


Wax and Clay

by unpossible



Series: Grenade 'verse [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, Post-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Pre-Relationship, Redeemed Ben Solo, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-11
Updated: 2017-01-29
Packaged: 2018-09-16 19:58:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 22
Words: 29,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9287519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unpossible/pseuds/unpossible
Summary: The child is screaming. Panic stricken. It’s nothing Kylo Ren hasn’t heard a thousand times before. And yet.Something in this sound, in the wide, hazel eyes strikes at what he would once have called his heart. Hehesitates.In that split second two things become clear. First: he can’t do this anymore. He has to stop – hemuststop.Second: they will never let him stop.





	1. Chapter 1

 

The child is screaming. Panic stricken.

It’s nothing Kylo Ren hasn’t heard a thousand times before. And yet.

Something in this sound, in the wide, hazel eyes strikes at what he would once have called his heart. He _hesitates_.

In that split second two things become clear. First: he can’t do this anymore. He has to stop – he _must_ stop.

Second: they will never let him stop.

 

Three of the Knights of Ren are arrayed in a group behind him, having already dealt with the rest of the tiny ship’s crew. There’s a low moan of pain on his right, and then the injured is efficiently silenced by a blaster shot from one of the stormtroopers.

He stares into the child’s hazel eyes – so very much like _her_ eyes - as a plan begins to unfurl inside his mind.

Kylo Ren knows what he must do. He must leave no survivors.

The father is crouched  over his child, face white and set with the knowledge of what horrors await.

“Do you know what this is,” Kylo Ren says, his mechanical voice betraying no tremor.

He lifts his black-gloved hand and displays the grenade. The father lets out a dry, choked sound.

Kylo is hyper aware of the nine soldiers at his back, ranged between him and the tiny ship they had waylaid. The ship’s ramp is still open, engines still pulsing with an audible whine.

The child’s screams are tapering off into sobs when Kylo flicks the switch. He keeps time silently in his head as he lowers his hand but leaves the grenade hovering in mid air, gripped only by the Force. _Three._

“This grenade is the beginning and the end,” he tells the heartsick father, the sobbing child. _Two_.

“It is what will set you free.” _One._

He sends the tiny oval flying, _not_ towards the prisoners but backwards, past the First Order soldiers and straight into the heart of the crippled ship. He can feel the first glimmers of confusion in the minds of the Knights as they turn to watch, but it is all happening too quickly for them to react, and the tiny ball of destruction cracks into the fuel cells of the ship just at the moment of detonation. _Zero._

Kylo is already moving forward, body curving over the father and child. He has only enough time to throw up a buffer of the Force between the three of them and the ship, before the initial explosion ignites the fuel cell and everything is a screaming ball of fire.

 

He can tell its only minutes before he regains consciousness. He’ll have to be thankful for that. They’d left no-one behind on the _Finalizer’s_ shuttle parked several fields over, so there’s no-one to report the explosion. But his ‘training’ at the hands of the Supreme Leader after the _Starkiller_ debacle leaves him no doubt. Snoke has him on a short leash now, and Hux will be on his way to this planet the moment Kylo misses a scheduled report. He has very little time.

He pushes himself to his feet, grimacing beneath the mask at the prickle and burn in his back, the bruising he’s going to develop from the explosion’s concussive force. The Force shield can only stop so much from an explosion that powerful. For just a moment he allows himself to stop, breathe, and panic. He is reversing the entire course of his life based on a half-second decision.

Deep in the recesses of his mind, Kylo Ren pictures the small, shining circle, like a jet black river rock, that he holds at the core of his mental landscape. He calls forth the image, like an imaginary worrystone, sees it is intact, and forces down the panic. He has made his decision, now there is only the need to keep moving forward.

The man is still curled on the ground at Kylo’s feet, hovering protectively over his child who seems now to have passed into shocked silence.

“What. What did-” The man is blinking.

“More will be coming. Within the next twelve hours,” Kylo tells him. “I would advise you not be here by then.”

“You. You killed them.”

There’s nothing to say to that. Kylo scans the serene farmland stretching out to the horizon, and decides on his direction. He needs to shed this identity, of course, but first he will put some space between himself and these witnesses. No need to show his face now, when it is known to so few.

A rueful smile forms beneath the mask. Odd, that the thing that symbolises his commitment to his grandfather’s legacy, to Snoke, might actually help him escape his Master. He lifts his hand as he walks toward the still-burning ship, and hits the release for the helmet. He stares down at the familiar shape of it, cradled in his hands. He reaches for the knife he carries in his belt and slices without hesitation into his own scalp, behind one ear. The hot burst of blood begins, and he places the helmet back on his head to let the blood soak into the interior.

Kylo glances over his shoulder, ignoring the pain in his scalp. “Your best hope for safety for yourself and your child are to never speak of what you saw today. Do you understand?”

“I understand that the First Order have no use for witnesses,” he spits, his voice flat and angry.

Kylo Ren nods once, then turns back and removes his newly-bloodstained helmet. He throws it directly toward the smoking ruins of the ship. It lands with a clatter, and while it is still rolling through the wreckage, Ben turns on his heel and strides away.

 

 

The settlement is mid-sized, just enough that his presence isn’t completely unnoticed, but doesn’t cause a stir, either. He has shed his distinctive cape and pilfers some scraps of fabric to staunch his bleeding scalp. He ties the remainder of the material around his throat for no real reason. Perhaps because it was something Kylo Ren would _not_ do. His lightsaber is tucked at the small of his back, beneath the tails of his shirt.

Ben makes for the narrow, dimly lit passageways that can always be found on any planet or space station, the places where drinks are spiked, credits are stolen and shady deals are done. He spots a figure roughly his own height walking away from the body of a barely–conscious trader, and follows. When he comes face to face with the thief and realizes it’s an Ubese he almost quails. The story of his mother entering Jabba’s palace in disguise to rescue his father had been told to him often enough that the he had never been able to shed the memories, no matter how hard he tried.

Still, the mask will prove useful, and since he can no longer be Kylo Ren, what is left except to admit that he is, once again, Ben Solo. He relieves the Ubese of his clothes and his credits, and approaches the spaceport with his face safely concealed.

It isn’t hard to find passage on a ship, a combination of offering some coin and some delicate Force-persuasion has him breaking orbit within two hours of the explosion. He’s not fooling himself that he’s guaranteed his safe disappearance, not with the First Order’s resources. But the explosion had been strong enough to destroy almost all of the bodies at the crash site, and the very fact that he hadn’t been planning to disappear means there’s no evidence for them to follow. He hadn’t done anything suspicious precisely _because_ he hadn’t planned any of this. They will find his burned, bloodstained helmet and nothing more.

He needs luck. Luck, and the courage to tread a path he’d thought was closed to him forever.

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

He transits to Duola, a spaceport big enough that he can disappear in it, and acquires the hooded robes of a pilgrim with the last of his stolen credits. He repeats his earlier antics, finds a drug deal happening in the back alley of a cheap bar and walks away with two more ident cards and a healthy pile of credits. He likes this strategy. Criminals are less likely to complain to the authorities, for one thing, and whatever comes next, he feels better about targeting thieves than ordinary citizens. From Duola he buys passage to a mining colony at the edge of a nebula, on an old smugglers ship that reminds him far too much of his childhood for comfort.  

He stares at the bulkheads and considers his options. He can’t kill for the First Order anymore. In fact, he’s not sure he can kill for anyone, anymore. What does that leave him? Being a weapon is all he knows.

For sheer survival’s sake, the smartest thing to do would be to throw his lot in with the Rebellion. If the Rebels can prevail, Ben might be safe from Snoke and the First Order.

His mouth twists. Can he not even admit it to himself? That beyond survival… _I want to see my mother._

Things can never be put right, he _knows_ that. Ben closes his eyes and in his head he is once again meeting the gaze of his dying father. Staring into that familiar face and knowing he has made the worst possible mistake in a life full of mistakes.

No. Some things can never be put right. Never be forgiven. There is no redemption for himself. But there is his mother. And there is… _her_. Whatever he does now must be for the sake of the two women he- _cares_ for, and not for his own sake.

The Rebellion, then. With Kylo Ren’s inside knowledge, the Rebels could strike hard at some of the First Order’s key bases. Disrupt supply lines and weapons production.  Possibly turn the tide of the war.

In the familiar silence of hyperspace, alone in the shabby bunk he’d paid too much for, Ben closes his eyes and lets himself think.

Of _her_.

“She is stronger than I am, grandfather,” he whispers into the dark. “Even from a thousand light years away, she bests me.”

He opens his eyes and thinks again of the crying child, the white-faced father. “I thought I could do it. Thought I could go on as I was and ignore what she left behind, left inside of me. But I can’t. Even that one small piece of her…”

He sighs, curls in on himself, and hopes that when he sleeps, his dreams will be of Rey.

 

 

On the mining colony he buys a hot meal and lets the conversations and thoughts of those around him fill up the aching space inside his mind. His dreams had not been kind, last night, and phantom screams still echo in his ears. Eyes closing, he retreats back into his mind until he can see the shiny black pebble he hides behind layers of mental shields.

He is using the salty-sour bread to mop up the last of the food in his bowl when he feels the sickly unease of controlled panic from one of his dining companions. He reaches for his drink and lets his senses sharpen, sifting through the minds of the crowd until he can find the source and read them. When he does, it takes all of his control to keep his face blank and his body still.

Two seats down from Ben sits the pilot of a different kind of smuggling ship. Nothing like Han Solo – this cargo takes the form of a number of young females, all drugged into unconsciousness and stolen from various local schools.

 _We should have been off-planet by now_ , the pilot is thinking, almost hysterically. But the boss has gotten greedy, Ben sees. He has delayed for a special shipment – Twi’lek twins, who will fetch a high price on their own, and much more if sold as a pair. Ben’s mouth flattens into a thin line of distaste. It seems he’s found his next transport.

He plucks the ship’s location from the pilot’s mind and makes his way there, face buried deep in the hood of his robe. It’s easy enough to conceal himself in the shadows, and await the pilot’s return. It’s even easier to disable the two men and leave them tied up and unconscious beside the spaceport doors, with their intended cargo sleeping peacefully on a pile of blankets near a security panel. Ben has thoughtfully left behind a few large hydrospanners within arms’ reach of the girls, and he can only hope they get the chance to use them on their would-be slavers before spaceport security arrive.

Once he’s free of atmo and the spaceport’s flight control, Ben swallows, closes his eyes, and then plots a course for [Kashyyyk](http://www.starwars.com/databank/kashyyyk).

 

 

It’s not in his nature to indulge weakness, but Ben takes a deep breath as he hits the button to open the ship’s ramp. That familiar damp-earth smell invade his senses once again.

It’s been almost two decades since he set foot here. It still feels the same, everything cool and green and welcoming, but he hasn’t been this afraid since he reached out a shaking hand and keyed in the code that would allow the First Order soldiers inside his uncle’s Jedi Academy. Because beneath that cool green aura is a volcano of berserker rage, and Ben knows full well he has earned a share of that rage.

He doesn’t recognise the Wookie at the landing pad’s checkpoint. Ben doesn’t speak. Doesn’t trust himself to speak, to know what he could possibly say. He hands over his stolen ident, watches it scan green and walks away without difficulty. As he does, he lifts his face toward the security cams that line the elevated walkways. Whatever his ident says, someone in there will recognise him. It’s been years, and he was a child the last time he visited, but Wookies don’t forget.

They don’t forget, and they don’t forgive. It’s just as likely as not they’ll kill him, and he finds himself swallowing at the thought. All these years he’s lived in exile from his family, swearing it didn’t matter if he died without reconciling, and he didn’t care what they thought.

What a blind fool he’d been.

It _mattered._ It mattered more than he’d ever admitted to himself. Because the thought of dying – of being killed – before he can make things right with the only family he has left? The thought of dying _now_ , dying while his mother thinks him lost to the Dark Side, and while _she_ still hates him?

It is more than he can bear.

 

 

 

He makes it as far as the strip of cantinas before Security Forces pull him aside. They aren’t gentle, but they don’t shoot him in the back and dump him into the swamp to decompose, either, so overall he’s inclined to count this as the luck he’d been hoping for. They drag him to the local cellblock, where he sees his first familiar face, and after that it goes about as badly as he’d expected.

 

 

 

Ben hits the far wall of the cell with a grunt, glad he’d turned sideways enough to land on his good shoulder. He slides to his knees, eyes closing against the pain. Dislocation is never fun, even when it was accidental.

 _Probably_ accidental, anyway. Ben falls back against the wall of his cell and looks up as a familiar furry face slams the door shut, the dark liquid eyes glaring at him the entire time.

Nyebacca had been a childhood friend, once. Chewie’s nephew, a handful of years younger than Ben, and they had run wild in the treetops, once upon a time. Ben’s high, childish voice and Nyebacca’s staccato barking laugh had echoed through the forest for weeks on end, every year. Now the young Wookie is wild with grief, barely in control of himself.

Still, a dislocated shoulder is a small price to pay, in the scheme of things. Ben had certainly earned worse in Snoke’s service, and for far less reasons.

Nye will contact his uncle. It might be simply so that Chewie could come here and execute Ben personally, but at least he can be sure Chewie will definitely come.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

He waits in the cell and finds himself lingering on painful memories. It distracts from the blazing agony in his shoulder, especially when he’s forced to wrench the joint back into the socket himself.

Once, and once only in the past few months, Ben had let himself touch briefly on the well of grief inside him. In the dark of night, unobserved and alone aboard the _Finalizer_ , he had thought…

_Daddy._

He had heard…

_Chewie’s scream of grief and rage._

He had felt…

_His father’s clutching hands._

The tide of feeling had risen so fast, swamping his control, his discipline, his hard-won ice-cold heart.

Ben had thought he could never hear a worse sound than the one that had ripped from Chewie’s throat that day on the _Starkiller_. He had been wrong.

 

 

“Kylo Ren,” his mother says, and just that is enough to break him.

He stares helplessly through the bars at her.

She has aged. Far more than was warranted by the decades they had been apart. And Ben knows, suddenly, that the weight of years his mother carried had arrived all at once, and lately. Had arrived along with the news that her only child had killed his father. Had killed the only man she had ever loved.

_“No,”_ he says, and his voice cracks. “Not anymore.”

At her side, Chewie shakes a sorrowful head and half-turns away. On Chewie’s back, Ben sees a ysalamir in a harness, and he knows now why he didn’t sense his mother’s approach. The presence of the animal means Ben’s Force powers are unusable. So. They don’t trust him at all, then.

“Please,” Ben says, and raises his one good hand. _“_ Mother, _please.”_

“Why did you come here, Kylo Ren,” she says, face set in stern lines.

He lowers his hand, feels himself slump. He stares down at the floor and doesn’t answer until he knows he can hold back the pleas. She doesn’t want that from him, and he has no right to make any demands at all. Not for mercy, and certainly not for forgiveness. “I knew what to expect, here,” he tells her. “I knew there’d be no-one from the First Order, and I knew they’d contact Chewie.”

“So you wanted to speak to us?”

 “I didn’t expect … _you,”_ he manages. “But yes.”

She looks away.

“I’ve left the First Order,” he tells her.

Chewie makes a low, scornful sound. /Lies/

“It’s true,” he insists. “I escaped.”

“Why.”

“I couldn’t. Couldn’t do it anymore,” he admits, voice low. He raises his eyes to hers and finds her watching him, all her sorrow written clearly on her face. “Mother,” it slips out, his hand catching on the bars between them, “I’m sorry. I’m so, _so_ sorry.”

She flinches and looks away again. He doesn’t feel any better to see the mask of the General slip, to know his mother is under there, burning alive with grief.

“I know nothing can make it right. I know I can never be forgiven. But I wanted you to hear me say it, just once at least.”

There’s a long silence. “You’ve left the First Order,” she repeats, in that low, husky voice that forms his earliest memories. “And now what? What exactly do you expect?”

“Nothing,” he says immediately. “I’m not asking for a pardon, or anything like that.” He hesitates, then says, “If you want intelligence, I can tell you what I know. They shouldn’t be looking for me, so they have no reason to change out my codes-”

“They’re not looking for you?” she breaks in.”Where exactly do they think you are?”

“Dead,” he says. “They think I’m dead. I… blew up a ship, and there were no survivors to report back. I walked away.”

She doesn’t answer that. Doesn’t say anything for a long time. She glances sideways at Chewie, and they seem to be communicating silently. Without looking at him she says, “You’re injured?”

“Oh,” Ben says, looking down at his arm. “I-yes. It’s all right. But. A sling might be useful.”

She gives one sharp nod and then she’s gone. Ben watches Chewie follow her through the door and lets out a long breath. The ysalamir in its cage is left behind, just inside the door.

 

 

A med droid comes to see him half an hour later, scans his shoulder and provides a sling, and then the evening meal arrives. Ben is toying listlessly with the food when he feels her presence more than sees her, which makes no sense at all considering he can’t currently access the Force. He drops the spoon back into his bowl and backs away from the cell door, eyes wide.

Rey appears in the doorway a few seconds later. The little scavenger girl who has turned his entire existence upside down. Why? Why on earth would they bring her to the planet Ben is on? Surely they understand the danger he poses to her?

She’s changed. A little, anyway. More confidence in her stance, and some part of him recognises it before he’s really aware of it. She’s been training with Luke, then. She found her Jedi Master.

The rest of the changes – the set of her jaw, the shadows in her eyes – those are Ben’s doing, he knows. Kylo Ren taught her how ugly the world can be, how fragile trust is.

The little girl who waited faithfully for all those years for her family to return. And she had watched Ben _kill_ his family. Kill his own father, in cold blood.

There’s no way they’ll ever find common ground. He reaches for the touchstone in his mind and pulls together all the control he can muster.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he tells her.

Once, perhaps, they might have nourished this tiny connection. Once, Ben might have been worthy of bonding with a soul so full of Light, so connected to the Force. If he’d been strong enough when they met, if he hadn’t been so full of fear and resentment.

Not now.

“If you try to hurt her,” Rey tells him, white teeth bared, “I’ll stop you. I’ll _kill_ you,” she amends.

Ah. This is why Rey is on Kashyyyk, then. She probably insisted on coming. She has bonded to his mother – never having had a mother of her own – and he can’t help but be pleased, underneath it all. Perhaps a loving daughter can heal his mother’s heart. “Understood,” he says.

She seems unnerved by his easy agreement, and shifts around. “You’re a monster,” she says, after a long moment.

“I am,” he says. “Which is why you should stay far away from me.”

She glares at him, angrier still, and from nowhere Ben feels the crazy impulse to grin. Oh, what sparks they could strike from one another, if things were different. He has the sudden, vivid understanding of why his parents had sometimes seemed to _enjoy_ their arguments.

“You should go now,” he says again. “Luke won’t like it if he finds out you were here.”

Her eyes flash. “I suppose you think I should keep secrets from my teacher. Is that your plan? To drive a wedge between me and Master Luke? Interfere with my training?”

This time Ben can’t suppress the smirk. “ _You_ came _here_ ,” he points out. “It’s not as though I invited you, or as though I can keep you out. Tell Luke, or don’t, it’s your choice. I’m just pointing out the obvious. He won’t like it. My mother won’t approve, either.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” she says, “And I won’t let you destroy what we’re trying to build.”

She takes one step back, then another, her eyes locked on him like they would be on a live snake.

She has good instincts, the scavenger girl. No doubt that’s how she survived this long.

“Goodbye,” Ben says to her back. Only when the door has closed between them does he say, “Goodbye, Rey.”

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

He wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of his cell door opening. He’s on his feet in a heartbeat, the reflex of years of living in constant vigilance. He sees them, the small group already moving into the cell, batons in their hands and their set, angry faces, and he knows what this is.  
They seem surprised that he can fight. They probably assumed he relies only on the Force, and it’s true he feels its absence in this moment more keenly than seems possible. But he has taken his fair share of beatings within the First Order, punishments ordered by Snoke, and there were plenty of times when the only physical release he could bear was the honest effort of sparring with the other Knights. So he fights them, knowing he will lose, but feeling somehow better for it.

 

He’s still conscious when they leave, their low curses of murderer still ringing in his ears. Nothing is broken, he’s fairly sure. He is bruised and battered but he will survive.  
A mirthless smile crosses his face at the thought. He will survive. Doesn’t he always.

 

It’s only in the light of day that Ben realizes he has a problem. This wasn’t sanctioned, he knows his mother enough to know that. She has never resorted to torture, and it’s hardly likely she’d start with midnight beatings of her own son. Which means that the bruises and split lip are evidence that someone in the Rebellion is defying her authority. They didn’t kill him, though, which means she is still ultimately in charge.  
If she sees his injuries she will investigate, she will discipline those involved. She won’t have a choice, but that punishment will cause further problems with those who hate Kylo Ren as he deserves to be hated, and call her impartiality into question. Ben sighs. Perhaps he can hide it. He will try.  
When his breakfast tray is delivered he makes sure to be feigning sleep for it, and stays concealed under the blankets. It’s easy enough. When he’s done eating, he slides the tray out of the cell and takes up a meditation pose, his back to the corridor and the cameras. He stays where he is as the day passes. Every part of him aches, his face is swollen, and he has two loose teeth. Ironically enough, the meditation may actually help speed his healing.  
He ignores the lunch tray, and waits until lights out in the cell before he turns to collect the dinner tray and pick through it. If no-one comes to speak to him for another couple of days he may actually get away with this.

 

Of course, his luck being what it is, he is paid a visit the next morning. It is Chewie who brings his breakfast tray, and when Ben doesn’t rise from his bed the Wookie raises his voice to the control room /open the door/  
Ben sighs. The door clicks open, and he hears Chewie’s footsteps, the clunk of the tray being laid down on the floor. /wake up/ Chewie says.  
He turns over, still mostly concealed within the blankets, and meets Chewie’s dark liquid gaze.  
Chewie makes a little chuffing sound at the black eyes and bruised jaw.  
They stare at one another in silence.   
Chewie shakes his head mournfully.   
“It’ll pass in a few days,” Ben tells him. “There’s no need to mention this to her.”  
/Who/  
Ben shrugs. “We didn’t exchange names.” Then one corner of his mouth quirks up. “At least four of them will have some bruises of their own, though.”  
/Any Wookies?/  
Ben shakes his head.  
/I’ll take care of this/ Chewie chuffs.  
Ben shrugs.   
/I’ll take care of it/ Chewie repeats, glaring at Ben.  
“All right,” he says, placating. “All right, Chewie.”  
As the cell door closes behind him again, the Wookie hesitates. Then, /eat/ he says, his back to Ben. It’s hardly possible for his tone to get gruffer, but somehow it does. /you need to eat more/  
Ben throws off the blanket and stares down at himself. He has lost a little weight, he supposes. His mouth twists. Chewie, the mother hen. He keeps his head down as he collects the tray, face away from the camera, but he eats every bite. It seems the least he can do for his godfather.


	5. Chapter 5

 

 

Rey watches, narrow-eyed, as Kylo Ren spends the entire day hiding from the camera.

She’s _sure_ he knows it’s there. He’s not doing anything that she can pinpoint, though, nothing obviously suspicious. But then, he wouldn’t would he? He was smart, and subtle – well, if you ignored the outfit.

“Chewie,” she says at dinner that night, “something’s going on with-” and she hesitates, dropping her voice and double-checking that the General is nowhere in earshot. “With _him_.”

The huge shaggy head lifts and he regards her with his old, wise eyes. They watch one another for a moment, and then he nods. /I’ll check/ he tells her, and she nods her thanks. Everyone has been very insistent Rey not interact with Kylo Ren, and to be honest she’s not eager for any more conversation with the man.

It’s too strange, to look at him now, in his plain, rough tunic, hair too long and the scar she gave him bisecting that face. He still has presence – she doesn’t have to be in the room to know _that_ – but he’s not… _performing_ anymore. It makes her uneasy. She liked him where he was before, locked away with all of the other things she despises.

This strange in-between state where he’s their enemy but _not_ -

She doesn’t really know what to do with that.

 

 

 

When she sees Chewie mid morning of the next day she can tell he’s troubled. He waves her off, but seeks out _Luke,_ which makes no real sense. Luke hasn’t spoken with the prisoner at all, he’s maintained a careful perimeter of watching Kylo Ren and monitoring the Force around the prison, the city, and, in deepest mediation, the planet itself. He’s checking for disturbances, imbalances, something that will indicate what the First Order is really doing with this odd tactic of giving them Kylo Ren.

Luke seems unsurprised when Rey approaches him later.

“Is… everything all right, Master?”

He is staring into the distance as he so often does. Sometimes she wonders if he can see things others can’t, or is it just habit from being so alone for so many years.

“It may be time to take a risk,” he says.

“Master?”

He sighs. She waits, and finally he turns to her and says, “When you fought Kylo Ren, in the forest. What did you learn?”

She blinks. She doesn’t often think of that fight. It’s too strange – the way he had struck at his own wounds, as though pain was the only currency he had, and the way he had reached out to her, such urgency in his voice she still hears in her dreams- _I could teach you the ways of the Force._

“If you knew nothing else of Kylo Ren but those few minutes of the fight,” Luke clarifies, “how would you have described him?”

She swallows, but forces her mind back to it. Thinks about the way he’d removed Finn from the equation without killing him. She knows now from her own training that simply wounding someone with a lightsaber is far, far harder than killing them. In a fight like that the most likely thing is that someone dies – quickly – or they lose a limb. Her eyes flick down at Master Luke’s hand, and she thinks about Darth Vader’s image in Kylo Ren’s mind.

“I’d have said he doesn’t enjoy killing,” she says slowly. “He let me go without even wounding me, and considering I’d never handled a lightsaber before, that’s almost impossible. He didn’t kill Finn, either. He… tried to-”

“-tempt you,” Luke finishes for her, and unaccountably, she flushes. “Yes,” Luke muses. “He kills when necessary, it seems. Or when ordered to,” he adds, voice dropping very low. “But not from enjoyment or instinct.”

She thinks it over. “Yes,” she agrees. “That’s how it… feels to me.”

“The philosophers argue that a warrior reveals themselves most truly in the act of fighting,” Luke says, and she thinks he’s mostly talking to himself again. “They would say that a man who can fight cleanly even when outnumbered, and resist an easy kill, is a man who can be redeemed.”

“Master?” she says, confused.

Luke closes his eyes and breathes deep and slow. “Two days,” he finally says. “In two days time we will give Kylo Ren the chance to show us who he truly is.” His mouth tightens, “Let the others know that all but a handful of our people should be on a ship in orbit by oh-nine-hundred the day after tomorrow. _Including_ the General,” he says sternly. “If this is a plot, I want our ship to be ready to jump to light speed at the first word.”

“Shall I remain with you, Master?”

He slants a sideways glance and her and she has the deep certainty that he knows something about Rey she is completely unaware of. “You will be on that ship, making sure that my sister _stays_ on it, no matter what happens.”

She grimaces. “I’ll try.”

The brief, flashing smile on his face reminds her that once upon a time, Luke Skywalker was a young, reckless man who dreamed of fleeing a dead end planet much like Jakku. She doesn’t see that smile often, but she hugs it close to her chest when the training is hard, and she’s discouraged.

Rey tries not to think about the other thing that gives her heart when she’s tired. It’s the look of shock, of respect on Kylo Ren’s face when she had fought back, had stood up to him in her mind. When their eyes had locked he had looked – had really _looked_ at her, the way no-one ever had. Like Rey of Jakku, the scavenger, was important. Like she was _remarkable_. Like he couldn’t look away.

She doesn’t have to be a Jedi to understand that her fascination with Kylo Ren is dangerous. She doesn’t have to be a General to know it’s best she stay away.

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

 

Ben wakes a few mornings later to find the _ysalamir_ in its cage has gone. He frowns, curious and confused, and reaches out tentatively to touch the minds around him.

 _Don’t even think about manipulating the guards_ , a familiar mental voice tells him. _Wookies are immune to Force manipulation, remember?_

“Uncle Luke,” Ben breathes.

_You don’t have the right to call me that anymore, Kylo Ren. You are no longer my nephew._

He swallows, hard. “I know what I did was unforgivable.”

_Do you._

“I do. And I don’t expect forgiveness. Or for you to regard me as anything other than a war criminal.” He takes a deep breath and drops out of speech. These words are for no-one but Luke. _But in my head, you remain my uncle. She is my mother. Chewie is my godfather. I have to hold on to that or I have nothing to hold onto at all. If I don’t have that, there is only madness, and no hope of making any kind of amends._

“Is that why you came here? To make amends?” Luke appears in the doorway, older and grizzled, but his voice is just the same as the one Ben remembers.

He takes an involuntary step forward and drinks in the sight of another Jedi. Luke’s eyes move over his face, narrow slightly at the fading bruises.

Luke waits out the silence. Finally, Ben says, “Not at first. Honestly, leaving Snoke was a decision made in the moment. I had no destination in mind. My only plan was to see if I could get away.”

Luke raises an eyebrow.

Ben shrugs. “The minute it seemed like I might have actually done it, it all seemed fairly obvious. If I couldn’t be theirs anymore, then I had to be yours.”

Luke’s head tilts to the side. “No third option occurred to you?”

Ben shook his head. “I know myself well enough to know that inactivity is dangerous for me. I need a purpose. I always did.”

“That’s a bland and dishonest word to describe what you did for Snoke,” Luke’s voice is light and calm, and cuts like a whiplash, “A _purpose_.”

“I thought it was my calling,” Ben says, voice cracking. “I thought I was meant to finish my grandfather’s mission.”

“Your _grandfather_ ,” Luke says dangerously, “abandoned his family and his honour to follow a madman, and caused the deaths of millions of innocent lives, beginning with his fellow Jedi.”

Ben closes his eyes.

“And with that in mind,” Luke finishes, “I suppose congratulations are in order, Kylo Ren. You have, indeed, fulfilled your calling and duplicated Darth Vader’s legacy in the most hideous possible way.”

Ben takes a step back and sinks down onto the bed, stomach churning. He knows all of this. Gods, does he _know_. But it’s different, somehow, to hear Luke say it in his calm, time-weathered voice. This is Luke, who battled Vader with minimal training as a mere boy, and survived. Luke, who found his father and his legacy and somehow had the heart and the control to repudiate the Dark Side and call forth Anakin from the depths of depravity.

Luke, who is the opposite of Ben in every way.

“I know,” he says dully. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t undo what you’ve done.”

“I know that, too.”

There’s silence. Then Luke says carefully, “No doubt you have information which will be of use to the Rebellion. As long as you do not play us false, you will come to no harm here. But do not for one moment think that we are weak.”

For a moment, Ben thinks his uncle is done. Then Luke steps forward until he is pressed against the bars and says, deadly quiet, “And if you attempt to harm or manipulate your mother in any way I will show you the kind of _mercy_ the Emperor once showed me.”

Ben manages a jerky nod in response, and his uncle strides from the room without looking back.

 

 

 

The interrogations begin after that. Sometimes individuals are brought in to ask specific questions about the layout of ships or bases, or the structure of the First Order. Usually Ben is blindfolded for these conversations which means, he assumes, he’s speaking directly to infiltrators. He sinks as deep into his memories as he can, gives them every tiny detail he can think of that might help. It doesn’t particularly matter what the Rebels think of him, but he is committed to their success now, and for his part, he will leave nothing undone.

Sometimes Ben is escorted to another building and speaks to larger groups - politicians, and he thinks with a pang of what Han Solo would say about these _committees_. For these visits it is obvious that there are _ysalamir_ everywhere he goes, and he is escorted by a flatteringly large accompaniment of guards. He never sees Luke, but he knows the other Jedi is near.

After a few days these interrogations become more like briefings – there are maps and charts and images to accompany the questions, though Ben is always carefully removed from the room before any specifics of the missions are discussed.

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

 

 

Then comes a small lull in the questions. He is almost sorry, because it means he does not even see his mother from across a room of advisers, or catch the occasional glimpse of Rey, glaring at him in suspicion.

After a few days of staring at the walls of his cell, Ben begins to receive individual visitors again. This time, he can sense their hostility and their anger before they even enter the cell block. These are not military strategists. He is not sure these are even true members of the Rebellion. Their questions relate, always, to the crimes of Kylo Ren.

He spends six days in this way, endlessly discussing the details of the planets he has attacked, spaceports and villages he has raided and decimated. Families murdered, ships destroyed without warning. On the sixth day, he is answering questions about the members of the Jedi Academy. The first of his crimes, and in many ways, the worst.

He is speaking automatically, almost numb.

This memory has always hurt the most – until recently, anyway. Now he has a fresher, even more intense regret to focus on. But at fifteen… he’d been so naïve, so _stupid_. He had wanted only to leave, to shake himself free of Luke and the expectations that went with being a Skywalker. Had been desperate to go somewhere where people would give him a true purpose.

The faces of his classmates have haunted him for so many years. He lets his head fall back against the wall of the cell and stares up at the ceiling.

“…so you didn’t actually see her die? You don’t know who, specifically, killed Rothea?”

“No,” Ben answers mechanically.  His voice is scraped raw, he’s talked so much these past few days. “I didn’t see.” He can picture Rothea.  She had been a Nagai. The first ever recorded to join the Jedi, and fiercely proud of it.

“ _What_ is going on here?” his mother’s voice is low but Ben would recognise the deadly tone anywhere. It was the way she’d sounded when he’d been caught climbing on the roof of Uncle Luke’s house, and when his father had been forced to sheepishly admit that he had, in fact, accidentally stolen ten pregnant hunting dogs from the Grand Duke of Tarkor.

“General Organa!” the interrogator leaps to her feet. “We weren’t- uh, we are debriefing the prisoner-”

“This prisoner is under held under my authority,” the General breaks in, “and I have most certainly _not_ authorised any such debrief. Who ordered this?”

“We, uh-”

His mother’s mouth tightens. “I see. You decided that revenge was more important than the missions we are running, and took advantage of my absence.” There’s a moment’s pause, and then she snaps, waving a hand, “ _Look_ at him. He’s exhausted. This is not the time for dredging up the past.”

“I apologise, General.” For a moment it looks like the woman is done, and then she adds coldly, “I wasn’t aware that the prisoner’s feelings were more important than establishing the facts of his past behaviour.”

Leia Organa Solo’s eyes narrow and she stalks forward, strong and regal and furious. The interrogator tops her by at least a full handspan in height, but somehow the General towers over her, and every other person in the room by sheer presence alone. _She’s doing the Princess thing,_ Ben thinks. His father used to whisper it sometimes, out the side of his mouth, _uh-oh, look out, she’s doing the Princess thing. Now we’re in trouble, Ben._

“This prisoner has provided intelligence on troop numbers, base locations, weapons capabilities, logistics, codewords, tactical weaknesses and future plans of the First Order since he arrived here. We are running missions right now – your fellow soldiers are risking their lives based on his intel. If we needed to fact-check, or get input on a mission in real time, do you think he’s in any state to give reliable information to our soldiers in the field? _Do_ you?”

“No ma’am,” the woman says quietly.

“You’ve put your judgement above that of the leaders of the Rebellion. I hope you can see why that’s a problem, and that this is about more than just one prisoner. Frankly, I expected better from you.” For a moment all is silent, then she says, “You and your team are dismissed from duty here. Return to base. You’re confined to quarters for a week, and when that time is up I will have a task for you that is suited to your capabilities. Possibly something in waste disposal. You should take this time to think about why you’re really here. We’ve all lost people,” the General says, and for the first time her voice falters. “Every one of us. You have to be able to focus on the bigger picture and not on personal revenge. Understood?”

“Understood.”

The door closes behind the woman and there’s silence for a long time. Ben sighs, and presses the heels of his hands over his eyes until he sees stars. “I’m still causing problems for you. Even now.”

“Nonsense,” his mother says, brisk.

“What is it now? They’re questioning your impartiality because I’m-” he can’t say _because I’m your son_. She doesn’t want that from him, and he can hardly blame her. “Because of our past connection.”

“There are always questions. And there are always idiots asking the wrong questions,” she adds, with a glimmer of her old sense of humour. “Surely you remember that.”

He tries for a smile. Somehow it’s easier in the dark. “Yes. That I do remember.”

They lapse into silence again. He hears a sound, the scrape of one small boot against the concrete floor, as if she’s taken a step closer. “You’re all right?”

“I’m fine, Mother,” the word slips out automatically. He hears her shocked intake of breath and adds hastily, “my shoulder is healed. I’m eating and sleeping. I have no complaints about the conditions of my stay, General.”

“I- I’m glad to hear it,” she says stiffly.

Ben feels his mouth twist up and hopes she can’t see it. He listens again to the sound of her booted feet crossing the floor, and then suddenly he remembers. “General,” he calls. The footsteps stop.

“Yes?”

“Do you know-” he stops, swallowing. He shifts his hands but makes sure they still cover most of his face, because he’s a coward and it’s easier to talk if he can’t see his mother’s expression. “Has there been any sign that Snoke knows I’m alive?”

He’s not surprised there’s a pause before she speaks, no doubt thinking through the ramifications of answering his question. “Not so far,” she replies cautiously. “Why?”

He lets out a long breath. “Just. Remembering – today, I mean. The questions about the Academy…”

Ben hesitates, and then says baldly, “Snoke could talk to me, inside my mind. Since I was a child. I’d… forgotten, I suppose. Pushed it away. But somehow, he was always there. Usually in my dreams, but… as time went on, when I was awake, too. It stopped once I-”

He presses his lips together. “Anyway, you might want to mention it to Unc- to Luke. If Snoke gets word that I’m alive he may attempt to invade my mind again. Luke should have a plan ready just in case. Tranquilizers, perhaps.” _Or a grenade,_ Ben thinks with black humour. “I’m not sure if bringing the _ysalamir_ back would help, or hinder. Luke might know if the Force bubble would prevent Snoke from reaching me. It’s also possible that the _ysalamir_ would render me incapable of fighting him off. I’ve never had cause to look into it.”

There’s such a long silence that he thinks perhaps she left without him knowing, and he’s been talking to himself this whole time. Ben drops his hands and turns his head to glance back over his shoulder at the door. His mother is staring at him as though she’s never seen him before in his life, and framed in the doorway behind her, is Rey. She must have been there the whole time.

“Since you were a _child?_ ” his mother says, voice hoarse.

Ben blinks stupidly at her, eyes flicking back and forth between her and Rey, who is staring at him as if she’s never seen him before. “Wh- I, yes,” he manages to say.

His mother raises a shaking hand to her mouth. “I didn’t – I never knew.” And he recognises that tone. That’s self-recrimination.

Ben meets her eyes and forces his awareness of Rey into the background. “There was no way you could have known,” he tells his mother gently. “I never told you.”

For a long moment they just watch one another. Then she says, very quietly, “I’ll tell Luke.”

Ben nods, his eyes flicking helplessly toward Rey just before the two women leave the room.

 


	8. Chapter 8

 

He is raw and deeply unhappy for the rest of the day. He cannot seem to put those ghosts to rest. His only respite is that brief glimpse of Rey, but even recalling that makes him shift uncomfortably. How much had she heard? Crouched in the corner with his hands over his eyes, it had been Ben’s most unguarded moment since his arrival here, and he does not want her to see him like that. It is dangerous, he feels it instinctively, for her to humanise him.

That spark of Rey that she left behind in him means only one thing – their minds, their spirits are incredibly compatible. In the midst of torture and interrogation their minds had connected. If she begins to empathise with Ben Solo, she could easily begin to slide toward forgiveness, and that he cannot allow.

He is staring blankly at the back wall of his cell when the evening meal arrives. His body feels empty, hollowed out. The endless cycle of guilt and recrimination is exhausting, and he cannot even rail at the unfairness of it, because it is _exactly_ what he deserves. If he spent every day from here onward feeling like this, it would be nothing more than justice.

When he’s heard the outer cell door close, Ben draws in a deep breath and turns toward the tray. Perhaps he can distract himself with the mundane necessities of living.

His eyes fall on the contents of the tray and his knees give out. He falls hard, grunts at the pain but he can’t tear his eyes away from the tiny plastic triangle. He reaches out a shaking hand to touch it, and feels his heart, his soul, crack wide open.

“I killed him.” It’s all he can say. “I killed him I killed him _I killed him_.”

He is rocking, arms wrapped tight around himself, voice hoarse and shredded with tears. “I killed him, Dad, _Dad-_ ”

Some distant part of his mind is trying to assert control. _This is ridiculous_ , he tells himself. But he is scraped so raw, has emptied all of his reserves – not just today, but for a week. Recalling every death at his own hands, the massacres he ordered, the cold vacuum of his life for so many empty years. And now, such a simple thing-

A plaspak of blue milk.

He can’t look at it. Can’t bear it. Not today. “Not today, no more, _please-_ ”

“Ben,” she is saying, “Ben, look at me, Ben, baby, what is it. What’s _wrong?”_

“I’m sorry, I’m _sorry_ , I’m _so_ sorry, _Momma_ ,” he chokes on the word and then his face is hidden, a small mercy, his face in her lap, the world is nothing, there is only the softness of her hands in his hair, the knowledge of her, she is here, she is here, _Momma_.

He hears a soft, mournful sound from Chewie /I remember, cub, it’s gone now, it’s gone/

Ben chokes on the kindness. Why, _why would they help him?_

He doesn’t know how long it goes on for. This, too, is new. Kylo Ren lived his life in a state of total awareness at all times, guarded and wound tight. He could count to the minute how long he would spend each night in sleep or meditation, and even then some part of him was awake, waiting for an attack, or a test. But here - here amongst the Wookies who loathe him and the Rebels who use him, and the family he has wounded so deeply – here Ben Solo can let go, can relax.

Ben is utterly drained when he finally straightens. He slumps against the side of the cot and passes a hand over his face.

He can’t feel embarrassment or shame. He should, he knows. But he has poured out every possible emotion now, there is nothing left but an empty vessel.

They share the silence for a while. His mother, still kneeling in the middle of the cell, Ben pressed against the bed, Chewie standing sentinel in the corner. Some part of Ben is grateful that Luke has stayed away for this, though he can sense the other Jedi on the fringes of his mind, no doubt watchful for Ben’s possible loss of control, or on alert for this to be some kind of trick.

“You shouldn’t be kneeling on a concrete floor,” he finally says, voice cracking. He rolls to his own knees and offers her his hands.

“At my age, you mean?” she says, and cocks a brow in a way that’s so familiar he feels the urge to weep again.

“Perhaps I meant someone of your rank.”

“That silver tongue,” she observes, and doesn’t say anything about who he inherited that from. Instead she takes his hands and lets him pull her gently to her feet. He can feel the moment of hesitation, that moment where she wavers between suspicious-General and concerned-mother, and then she sinks down to sit on the bed, and keeps one of his hands in hers.

“Ben- what happened?”

He swallows and looks down at their clasped hands. “Did you put it on the tray?”

“What?”

Chewie says softly, /the milk/

“I-” she shifts, uncomfortable. Ben is reminded, suddenly, that he is under observation and this is not simply a family conversation.

He lifts his head and stares at the point where he knows the camera is concealed.

“Yes,” she finally says. “It seemed a harmless… indulgence. You were obviously at the end of your endurance, and I thought it might help.”

“It’s not your fault,” Ben says, and drops his eyes. “It was meant as a kindness, I know that.” She doesn’t press for more. Leia Organa Solo knows when someone wants to tell her the truth, knows how to give them the space to find words. She has heard a great many confessions, over the years.

“Blue milk was my favourite drink as a child,” he says. “But, do you remember, when you used to go to all that effort to get it fresh for me? When we were on Naboo? Or Coruscant?”

“I remember.”

“And you used to scold-” he falters but forces himself to go on, “-you used to scold Dad for eating so much prepackaged food when there was fresh food available.”

“ _I’m an old freighter rat_ ,” she quoted softly, sadly. “ _Not a princess_.”

Ben manages a smile at that. “I could never bring myself to tell you,” he says. “But I liked the packaged stuff better.”

She turns her head to look at him. The tears are running freely again, and he lets them fall without shame. “He used to sneak me the plaspak milk whenever you weren’t looking.” He swallowed. “I found a dozen of them at the bottom of my bag when I went away to the Academy.”

Now her jaw trembles, eyes filling with tears.

“You didn’t just take him from me,” she says softly, “You took him away from _you_ , Ben.”

Chewie’s mournful counterpoint seems like the only thing left to say.

 


	9. Chapter 9

 

 

Rey stares at the screen in front of her. She doesn’t understand what she’s seeing.

He’s… _broken._

The thing she’s never told anyone, in all of the debriefs afterward, is that Kylo Ren had the nicest voice she’d ever heard. It’s one of the things she remembers most from being strapped into that chair. He’d taken off that mask and his face had been so… normal. So _young_. And then he’d spoken, and that voice had reverberated through her.

_You’re my guest._

And now, she supposes, he is _their_ guest. But this man, this broken boy who is sobbing out his grief, this is not the monster who told her _You know I can take whatever I want._

He’d understood her loneliness, and that had scared her most of all. She hadn’t wanted to feel anything in common with a monster who hunted people for an evil empire, who tortured them to get what he wanted.

But now she watches him drop to his knees in a cell, and all she can see are the most human parts of him. The ugliest parts, the worst mistakes, all on display.

Rey dashes away tears, angry at herself for the indulgence. Yes, she’d been lonely on Jakku. Lonely, and terrified, and angry. Sometimes all three at once. But during those really bad times, the loneliness had been something of a gift. Because no-one – _no-one_ – has ever witnessed her in a moment of weakness like the one she is seeing now. No-one has ever held her as she cried, or heard her sob for a parent who is never going to return.

She had longed for that, once upon a time. But then she had learned that the solitude and the distance gave her strength few others had.

He is a murderer, many times over. He is a fratricide. He is arrogant and cold. And yet.

He _feels_.

She rubs at her chest as he straightens, watches him gently hand his mother to the only available seat, and smile sadly at her over shared memories of a man who is gone.

And she has never understood a person less.

When his eyes lift to the camera he seems to stare right into Rey’s soul. She feels naked. Afraid and protected at the same time – how is that possible? She swallows, wondering why she is still here, watching him. She drops by this small room at least once every day, just to watch. She’s never spoken to him apart from that first day.

But he _fascinates_ her. And she is very much afraid of what that might mean.

 

 

 

 _Luke_ , Ben sends out silently when he is alone in his cell again, face still sticky with tears. _Will you do something for me?_

 _You’re asking for favours?_ His uncle’s mental tone is not welcoming.

_The holovid. Tonight’s holovid. Can you… protect it?_

_Embarrassed to be seen grieving for your own father?_

Ben can’t help the lash of fury he sends as a reply. _Not MY grief,_ he shouts silently.

_Ah. Protecting the General’s reputation, if not her heart?_

He draws in a deep breath and tries for calm. Luke is testing him, Ben knows that, and for a very good reason. The Rebels need to know what he will do if he ever loses his temper. What Kylo Ren might unleash. _Will you do it?_

 _I’m not in a position to help you at the moment,_ Luke replies finally. Which could mean he’s meditating upside down and levitating R2 over a volcano, or it could mean he’s in a top secret meeting and can’t leave. Hard to tell, with Luke.

 _I’ll send someone to check into it,_ Luke adds.

Ben really should have known what that meant.

 

 

 

“Master Luke says you have a request.” Rey stays near the outer door, arms crossed, defensive. Smart girl.

Ben takes a deep breath. “I asked him to check that tonight’s recording isn’t duplicated and distributed.”

“Of course it won’t be,” she says, indignant.

Well, that answers one question. She definitely watched it. Probably from the control room, as it happened. He swallows down the hit to his pride that provokes. Doesn't matter if she thinks him weak. Might be better if she does.

He sends her a chiding look instead. “You can’t possibly be that naïve.” He flicks a glance up at the two cameras that cover his cell. “These cameras automatically record, yes?”

She frowns, then gives one stiff little nod.

“Then I can promise you there are already juicy holovids of Kylo Ren under interrogation on the black market. A vid of my fit of weeping could probably net someone enough to buy one of those pleasure-palace ships.”

“No,” she says immediately. “They _would’t_.”

He shrugs. “I don’t care. I knew what I was getting into. But she doesn’t deserve to have her privacy invaded like that.” He swallows, then says, “Her grief for her husband belongs to Leia, not to the General.”

Rey stares at him, her eyes always so, so clear. “I don’t understand you _at all,”_ she says.

 _Join the club,_ Ben thinks.

“When you talk like that I can almost believe that you love her. That you have a heart in there somewhere. Buried deep.”

“But then you remember that I’m the one who killed him,” Ben finishes for her. “Don’t get your hopes up, little scorpion. I’ve had a lifetime of trying to understand my own psyche and the only advice I have for you on that topic is this: don’t.”

She gives him a long, unfathomable look. Then says, “I’ll remove the recording and give it to the General.”

“Thank you,” Ben says, and inclines his head. Then he turns his back on her, and doesn’t relax until he’s heard her footsteps retreat from the cell block.

 

 


	10. Chapter 10

 

 

Ben feels the surge of adrenaline, the panic before he understands what is happening. He’s on his feet, scanning for danger when logic kicks in and he realizes – it’s not his own panic.

It’s _Rey’s_.

He closes his eyes and casts his senses out in a wide net. The _ysalamir_ is not nearby today, thank the Force. It’s easy enough to locate the problem – his mother is there, and the pilot, Dameron, as well as the stormtrooper who defected. Finn, they call him now.

All three of them are frightened, worried, and calling out for Rey, but she’s not projecting anything now, which means she’s unconscious. There’s something wrong, something mechanical – she was trying to fix it, he can see flashes from his mother’s mind – and it’s all gone terribly wrong.

He breathes in and brings his focus to the mechanical lock on the door of his cell. He hadn’t bothered to touch on it before – had no interest in escaping. But now…

The bolt slides free and Ben wrenches the door open.

_No,_ his mother is thinking, _nonono not her too, I can’t lose her too_.

_No_ , Ben thinks in reply. _Not her. I will not allow it._ He is automatically reaching for his mental touchstone, that jet black pebble, shiny as blood at moonlight. He touches it once, for luck.

One more deep breath and he reaches out a hand in that instinctive action – the first one a Jedi ever learns. He can’t see what he needs, which would normally make it impossible to summon, but when it’s something he built with his own hand, something he is familiar with down to the last tiny components…

There is a smashing sound, and then his lightsaber flies through the high, narrow window that runs above the cell block door and smacks firmly into the palm of Ben’s hand.

One fiery swipe of the blade and the keypad on the outer door is a smoking ruin. The doors open and Ben powers down his weapon. He’s not planning on fighting anyone, and he can deflect any blaster bolts that come his way. Frankly, he doesn’t want the delay of fighting with panicked prison guards.

He is running, past other occupied cells, trusting on the link to his mother to guide him in the right direction. He bursts through two more doors in the same way as the first and fends off some blaster fire, and then he’s outside. Prisons built to hold Wookies were not designed to hold a user of the Force. _They should have kept their_ ysalamir _closer,_ he thinks clinically.

Ben flings himself over a catwalk and lands in a crouch, waits for a half-second to orient himself. Then he is running again, pelting past startled Wookies as he heads for the shipyards.

Of course. Where else would his scavenger be?

Ben settles into his run, concentrating on what his mother is seeing two levels down inside a huge hangar.

Rey has fallen into the belly of one of the massive repulsors that keep the town square afloat amidst the mile-high trees. Ben hisses his apprehension – the fall was not all that far, really, but the blow to her head was obviously no small matter, and the platform she has landed on is unstable. Unless the team on the other side of the engine can finish their repair in time, Rey’s platform will tip and slide sideways into the disposal area within a few minutes. The disposal that is mostly based on huge crunching teeth, if the General’s panicked thoughts are anything to go by.

At that moment Ben becomes aware of another presence, and he glances sideways to see his Uncle fall in at his side. They match one another step for step, running in silence, and then Luke shoots him a sideways glance that reminds Ben of his mother. “You didn’t think I just took the _ysalamir_ away and forgot to monitor you, I hope?”

Ben shakes his head and grips the handrail of the nearest stairs. He half flings himself down them, Luke right on his heels.

“Good. Because if you’d kept that lightsaber powered up for another two seconds it would have exploded in your hand.”

At the next set of stairs Luke flips up and over Ben’s head in a trick he’s seen fifty times before and has never managed to emulate. For a moment he is twelve years old again, and sickeningly jealous.

“Come on,” Luke said, and tilted his head toward the hangar. “She needs us.”

 

 

It doesn’t take long to see why Luke allowed Ben to come along. Even with two Jedi, this rescue will not be easy. What makes it even more complicated is the contingent of Rebel and Wookie security forces who arrived a few minutes ago, determined to gather up their escaped prisoner.

“I can hold the platform,” Luke is saying. “Of course. But as for who climbs down to get her-”

“I’ll go-” the pilot and the ex-stormtrooper say as one.

“If the blades of that fan start to turn,” Luke says, pointing at what’s beneath the platform, “you’ll need someone who can use the Force. And if Rey doesn’t regain consciousness…

“Let me go,” Ben interrupts impatiently. “You know it has to be me.”

_“Him,”_ the stormtrooper says. “We’re supposed to trust Rey’s life to _Kylo Ren?_ Are you _kidding_ me?”

“General-” one of the security drones begins, blaster in his hand but, thankfully, pointed at the deck.

“If I wanted to let her die,” Ben snaps at the stormtrooper, “I could have simply remained in my cell. And it would be a fairly ridiculous escape attempt, for me to escape my cell and come straight here, wouldn’t it?” No-one seems to have any reply to that.

Ben looks at his mother. As always, she’s the one in charge.

He swallows. “General,” he says, trying for calm. “I can do this.” _Mother_ , he doesn’t say. _Please trust me. Just this once._

_“General Organa-”_ comes a swift protest, almost drowned out by a Wookie howl of indignation that says something a lot more angry and colourful than that.

She gives Ben a long, level look. Then nods her head once. “Go,” she says.

Quieter, Luke adds, “And may the Force be with you.”

Ben shoulders past the outraged stormtrooper and bolts down the long walkway to reach the intake tube. He can hear pounding footsteps behind him and ignores them. When he reaches the tube and climbs up, his arm is grabbed in a steely grip and he looks up, irritated.

It’s the pilot. “You could die down there, you know,” he says.

“As if that’s of any importance right now,” Ben snarls. “Let me go before I _make you let go_.”

“You’d better not let her down,” he says, and pulls his hand away.                               

Ben lets go of the edge, and falls.

 


	11. Chapter 11

 

She’s unconscious. For a moment his entire world is a panicked _what if_ , then he finds a pulse. “It looks like scrapes and bruises mostly,” he calls up to the General, and he can feel her gratitude in the Force.

Crouched over Rey, he glances down. The huge fan below them is cycling on, and he reaches out with his mind for the emergency shutdown – a Wookie-huge switch he hadn’t been able to see from the top, which is at least three arm’s lengths away from the edge of the platform.  He takes hold of it with the Force and powers off the fan, removing one of their problems, at least. Now there’s just the possibility they’ll be tipped sideways into the disposal unit.

He leaves Rey where she is and scrambles to the edge where the platform is tilting at a dangerous angle toward the garbage chute. “Can you switch off the disposal?” he calls up to the small group looking down at them. He can distantly hear the inviting sound of chomping and metal tearing.

He hears a Wookie respond /powering down, but it’s a city-wide system. It takes time/

“Of course it does,” Ben murmurs to himself. He reaches over the edge, searching for anything he can use to wedge the platform and stop it from tilting further.

“We’re bringing a harness,” his mother calls down, “to winch her back up.”

Ben nods to show he’s heard. There’s a startled cry from above as Rey stirs. Crouched at the edge, arm outstretched, Ben turns his head just as Rey lifts hers, and their eyes meet. For a moment they’re both frozen, and then he sees her eyes widen, feels her surge of panic.

“Wait-” Ben begins, raising his hand in a plea. A second later he realizes how much that gesture loos like the one he’d made aboard the _Finalizer_ when he’d been plundering her mind for information.

“Rey-” various voices cry from above

She moves so fast, he barely fends her off. Her leg sweeps out to kick at him and Ben grunts, catching her shin in his hand. It almost pushes him over the edge of the platform, and he sets his teeth and shoves her leg back. He won’t fight her, she’s injured and panicking, and he can hardly blame her for fearing him. But he can’t let her hurt him, either. If they begin to truly fight they’ll probably tip the platform themselves and tumble into the disposal. Already the platform is tilting to a steeper angle.

She rolls away from him and is spinning into a crouch. Grimacing, Ben throws a hand up in Rey’s direction and locks his mind with hers. She’s concussed and confused, her shields shaky, and he drives her down into Force sleep inside of a second, hating that he has to touch her mind without consent. _Again_. Her body goes limp and he flings himself forward to catch her, saving her head from another blow. There are shouts of concern from above as she collapses.

For one half-second he holds her in his arms, stares down at her slack face, a trail of blood at her hairline and the beginnings of a black eye. She is warm and soft and so close, and he _aches_. The tiny spark she left behind in him flares supernova bright, illuminating his mind, his soul. Ben takes a shaky breath, and can’t help but gather her close against his chest, hoping it looks to the others as though he’s shifting his weight. He breathes in her scent, imprints it on his mind, and then lays her carefully back down on the cold metal grating.

“She’s fine,” he says, and looks up at the terrified faces above. “It’s just sleep.”

He looks down at her face again and he can feel in his mind the moment Luke joins the crowd above. Ben thinks of how quickly Rey had reacted. Even injured and confused, she had moved remarkably swiftly. He throws the memory of it outward, there for Luke to see if he so wishes, and he feels his uncle’s startled reaction, a trace of pride in his new apprentice, at how swiftly she’d struck out at Ben.

He can’t help himself. Ben lets out a huff of laughter and glances up at his uncle. “Good instincts,” he comments, and there’s a ghost of a smile in Luke’s eyes. It’s gone almost immediately as the entire repulsor takes a sudden lurch to the left. The watching faces above stagger and disappear, and the platform beneath Ben’s feet shudders and tilts. His feet are sliding out from beneath him.

He tightens his arms around Rey and looks around for an option. There isn’t much he can actually do – they’re in a smooth cylinder, the only breaks are the intake tube Ben slid down to get here, which is Ben’s full height again above his head, and then there’s the low vent by his knees, which leads directly to the disposal unit and those chomping teeth.

He grits his own teeth and reaches out to grip the higher side of the platform they’re both resting on. It’s angled at about thirty degrees by now, but if it tilts any further he’ll be able to bear both of their weights on one arm – for a while. The edge of cold metal grate bites into his palm.

There’s another lurch a minute later, some more startled shouts and Wookie growls from the other side of the engine. Whatever the other team was doing, it’s not going well. The platform tilts still further, and now he can feel blood starting to drip from his hand. It runs back down his wrist, dampening the sleeve of his tunic.

There are noises above and he glances up, it’s the pilot and the stormtrooper. “We’ve got the harness,” Dameron yells.

“There won’t be time to put her in it,” Ben calls back. “Just use it as a rope. Can you pull us both up?”

“You can’t just Force-jump out of there?”

“I could,” Ben tells the stormtrooper – no, wait, they call him Finn now. “But I wouldn’t be able to control the landing, and she would almost certainly be injured again.”

“Yeah, no, let’s not do that,” Dameron agrees. He is already feeding the harness and lead over the lip and down to them.

“Get a Wookie on the rope,” Ben says. The extra strength will help to keep them steady.

“Already on it,” Finn tells him, and turns to speak to someone who is out of sight up there.

The harness reaches them a moment later, and Ben eyes it carefully. There are far too many straps, and he’s in no position to try for anything other than a swift grab. He hears another startled yell from the other side of the engine, receives a _we can’t stabilise this side of the engine_ from Luke, and gives up on caution. “Ready?” he calls. He pushes against the underside of the platform with the Force to keep it steady for the next part.

“Go!” the pilot tells him, and in one movement Ben lets go of the grate, and lunges for the harness. His hand wraps around the small collection of clips at the base of the rope, and he winces as the clumps of metal bite into his already-bleeding palm.

“ _Pull,”_ he calls, and in the next moment they are being hauled into the air. He tightens the arm holding Rey against his chest, and grimaces when his feet leave the platform. His hand is now bearing both of their weights, and the arm clutching at Rey is the recently dislocated one. He’s had worse, of course, but along with Kylo Ren’s mask he seems to have shed the ability to detach from pain. He breathes through it and uses his feet against the sides to stop them from spinning.

It’s awkward when they reach the top. There’s a lot of fumbling with sweaty hands, and Ben’s injured hand is trapped between the sides of the cylinder and the rope itself as they try to haul Rey up and over. He bites his lip, bears it in silence, and tries to pass her over as carefully as he can.

Without Rey, he is able to use his good arm to help as he pulls himself up and over the side of the tube, though he half-falls gracelessly to the floor beside it.

“Come on,” the pilot says, grips his forearm and hauls him to his feet.

Ben looks over at Rey. Finn is cradling her in his arms as the Wookie medics swarm around the two of them.

“You need any medical attention?” Dameron asks. His eyes flick down to Ben’s bloodied hand.

“I’m fine,” Ben says shortly, and drags his eyes away from Rey’s slack body, her face turned up to the stormtrooper’s worried gaze. There’s a burning rage in his chest that he can’t be the one to hold her, offer comfort. It’s a dangerous path for his thoughts to travel, so he unclips his lightsaber from his belt, hands it to the pilot and turns to face the security team.

Ben forces the words out. “You should take me back.”

It makes the guards uneasy that Ben returns to his cell without any argument. He can see the little line between his mother’s eyes that mean she’s struggling with a decision, weighing the facts, but the locked door makes no difference to him. He’s lived in the prison of his own mind, his own fears for long enough that his outside environment barely registers anymore.

 

 

 

 

Somehow hearing that Kylo Ren was part of her rescue – a large part, according to Poe – makes Rey even _more_ prickly and sceptical. Why would he- it’s not- it makes no _sense_.

She sits, sulkily, in the quarters set aside for her recuperation, and wishes they would let her _do something._ This kind of inaction just wasn’t possible on Jakku, and she has no understanding of what the General means when she advises Rey to _relax, take some time to yourself_. Every scavenger knows that, same as for sharks, to remain still is to skirt the edges of death.

She slides from the bed quietly, wincing as the pain in her head flares a little, and manages to set herself in front of a ‘link without alerting any of her nursemaids. Mouth set in a line, she lets her mind turn over the few facts she knows about Kylo Ren. His old name. His many crimes. His arrival on Kashyyyk in a small ship of mysterious origins. She nods, boots up the screen, and sets about digging.

Kylo Ren has a plan. She’s _sure_ of it. Just because they can’t see it right now, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. And if he thinks that pretending to help Rey will dilute her suspicion, he has another thing coming.

 

 


	12. Chapter 12

 

Luke comes to see him that evening.

“Your mother tells me Snoke spoke to you as a child,” he says, eyes very intent.

“Yes.”

“Before the Academy?”

“Yes.”

Luke recoils, stunned, and shakes his head. “That’s not- I know you were a child, then, but. Surely by now you must have some understanding now of how _impossible_ that is.”

Ben stares at his uncle, not sure why this is disturbing him so much. He’d taken for granted Snoke’s abilities. “He’s- powerful.”

Luke is already shaking his head, “ _No_ , Ben.” He doesn’t seem to notice his slip. “No Force user is powerful enough to invade the mind of another across light years. It is not possible. For Snoke to accomplish this, he had to have met you, as a child, and implanted a suggestion.”

“What?”

“Do you remember when it began?”

Ben lets himself slide down to sit on the bed. “I was… five or six, I think?”

Luke’s eyes close briefly. There’s silence, then he takes a deep breath , holds out his hands, palm up, and says formally, “Will you allow me to touch your mind?”

Ben blinks at him. This is a reversion to his training days, and it leaves him more than a little unbalanced. There’s a long silence. Then, “I will,” he says, and climbs to his feet. He, too, takes a deep breath, and then he reaches through the bars of his cell and places his hands on his uncle’s palms, one human, one mechanical. Their hands grip.

Looking down, Luke says quietly, “You still have both your hands.”

Ben manages a jerky nod.

“At least that’s one family tradition we have not repeated in this generation.”

Ben’s eyebrow quirks without his permission. “Don’t speak too soon,” he says. “I’m young yet, uncle.” _And let’s not forget you sabotaged my lightsaber which could have easily blown my hand to bits_ , he doesn’t say, but he’s pretty sure Luke hears him anyway.

Luke’s eyes lift to his and he’s

_/a child again he’s_

_/not afraid of the dark he’s_ not _it’s just that Momma is away and he’s_

_/hearing the voice again and it says he’s special he’s so special he’s_

_/never going to get it right I thought you were a Skywalker why can’t you just admit he’s_

_/not one of them because they can sense the Dark Side in Ben because he’s_

_/my grandson it says in the night my_ heir _and he’s_

_/always disappointing someone because all the stuff that’s easy is the Dark Side but he’s_

_/meant to finish my legacy, Ben, my true heir and he’s_

_/not like Luke never be like Luke or Dad or Momma so who is he like he can be like grandfather_

 

Luke releases his hands abruptly and he is breathing unsteadily when he steps back and away.

There’s silence for a long time. Ben leans his head against the bars and stares at the floor. He hasn’t allowed himself to remember that level of detail for a very long time.

“So young,” Luke murmurs.

Ben says nothing.

“You thought he was your grandfather.”

He lets out a long, slow breath. “I did.” For a very long time he had thought his dreams had been in the company of the one person in the family he resembled.

“You were looking for someone to emulate.”

Ben’s mouth twists wryly. “It was obvious I never had the temperament to be either a carefree rogue or a patient politician.” And now he has invoked the ghost of Han Solo. He sighs. “I thought – everyone was so excited when I showed Force ability, but.”

“But you were nothing like me, either,” Luke says. It feels like the closest they’ve come to connecting with one another since before Ben arrived at the Academy and found an instructor, not an uncle.

Ben let himself slide down to sit on the floor. On the other side of the bars, Luke mirrored him.

“I don’t think any of you really understood…” Ben says slowly. “When we would meet other people, when Mother attended meetings and summits. There would always be this adoring crowd, for all three of you. The Heroes of the Rebellion. And I was so confused, always, because you were _ordinary_ to me. They talked about all of you like you were heroes of a holovid, but I never could see what they saw. You were just my family.”

He glances up and sees the ghost of a smile on Luke’s face. “But Darth Vader.” The smile drops away. “He was… _mythic_. He towered over all of the stories, and since I’d never seen _him_ spill voss juice down the front of his tunic, had never been yelled at by him because I’d left my satchel on the stairs, again…”

“Never heard him apologise for accidentally stealing hunting dogs…” Luke murmured.

“ _Pregnant_ hunting dogs,” Ben reminded him.

They were smiling sadly at one another. And then Luke said, “But Ben. Darth Vader was not your grandfather. Darth Vader was the man who tore your family apart, and the galaxy along with it. _Anakin Skywalker_ was your grandfather.”

Ben shrugs helplessly. “But no-one ever talked about him.”

Luke sighs. Then he gets to his feet, raises one hand, and gestures. The bolt on the cell door slides away and the door swings open. Ben stares at it, then at his uncle.

Luke raises a brow. “It’s largely a symbolic gesture, I agree. But symbols can be powerful things.”

“I’m still guilty,” Ben protests. “I committed those crimes. The crimes of Kylo Ren.”

“No-one here is ever going to forget that,” Luke says softly, and there is a gulf between them now that Ben knows will never be breached. “But there seems little point in playing out the charade of imprisoning someone who could escape at any time.”

“You could bring back the _ysalamir_ ,” Ben points out.

“I could,” Luke says tranquilly. Then he inclines his head, tucks his hands into the sleeves of his robe, and turns to leave.

Ben rises, and stands in his cell for a long time. He turns in a circle, surveying the space. He’d felt safe here. For the first time in decades, really, he’d felt truly _safe_. He grimaces wryly. This is so typically Luke. Every now and then his uncle displays absolutely devastating insight. Not all the time – obviously – but sometimes.

Out there, Ben will have to interact with people again. Not just interrogations, but conversations. Meals. Eye contact. Out there, he has to begin _living_ again.

Ben takes a deep breath, squares his shoulders, and walks out of the cell.

 

 


	13. Chapter 13

 

 

“You’re – you’re letting him _out?_ Master Luke-” Rey struggles to find a tactful way to say _have you completely lost your mind?_

“He could have escaped that cell at any time,” Luke replies. “Those walls were essentially meaningless.”

“Uh.” Finn says, glancing from one face to another. It’s still really hard for him to challenge those in authority, Rey knows. She appreciates the support. “Didn’t those walls mean at least he wasn’t, y’know, able to get into the places where we hold meetings, or snoop around in our records?”

The General has been staying out of the conversation for the most part, now she says, “Don’t worry. We are securing all of our records off-planet, and most of our forces have been deployed at this point anyway, hunting down the First Order’s remaining bases.”

“Do _you_ believe this? That he’s… reformed?” Rey asks her nervously.

She gives Rey a sad smile. “I want to believe it too much to trust my own judgement. I’m being led by Luke on this.”

And that’s the really strange part. Luke had been the _most_ sceptical. His attitude toward Kylo Ren had been stony and cold from the beginning. “And you- Master, you were so _sure_ -”

“He has allowed me to access his mind on several occasions,” Luke says. He hesitates almost imperceptibly, then says, “I can only say that what I saw there was not what I had expected, and it made me believe there is a chance he has, indeed, turned fully and permanently away from the Dark Side.”

Rey stares at him, mouth agape. “Unexpected… as in, you’re sure he doesn’t want to kill us all and destroy the Rebellion?”

Luke and the General lock eyes for a long moment. Finally Luke says, “There are no guarantees in life. But I can tell you that my nephew has gone through something that has left him fundamentally changed.”

Rey blinks at him. Sometimes the enigmatic way her Master talks is the most _maddening thing in the galaxy_. She spreads her hands in a mute appeal and glances at Poe, who has stayed silent this whole time.

He’s staring thoughtfully at Luke, but he seems to feel Rey’s eyes on him and turns to her. He hesitates for a long time, which isn’t like him at all. “I think it’s worth the risk,” he finally says.

 _“What?”_ Rey is left gaping at him. Poe spent time in that same chair she did. Poe knows what it’s like to have someone rip into your mind without care for the consequences.

Luke meets the pilot’s eyes. Something unspoken flashes between them, and Luke gives a tiny nod.

“Poe?” the stormtrooper says, confused.

He gives Finn a wry look. “A Force user that strong, on our side instead of theirs?” he shrugs. “The kind of information he’s been giving us has already been worth it’s weight in platina, and you can’t fake the kind of damage we’ve been doing to the First Order with the strikes he’s recommended. I think it’s worth the risk,” he repeats.

 

 

 

His mother, of course, has thought of everything. She and Rey are staying with Chewbacca’s family as honoured guests. Luke is apparently renewing a friendship with a Wookie elder he met many years before, while the rest of the rebel forces are billeted out among the family groups in the treetops.

 _“_ I thought perhaps you’d like to sleep on your ship,” the General says.

He can barely look at her. For some reason, he is terribly embarrassed, suddenly, by his outburst of the day before.

“I think that would be best,” he says instead. Then, darting a quick look sideways at her. “You’re not worried I’ll leave?”

“I’m well aware that if you decide to leave, Ben, there is nothing I can do that will stop you.” Her tone has a hard edge to it and he understands suddenly that this, too, is a test. But she _had_ used his old name. They are both of them on shaky ground, it seems.

“I’ve no desire to disappear, Mother,” he says. “But if there is somewhere else you’d like me to go – somewhere less… volatile than Kashyyyk, I will go where you send me. If the Rebellion has a prison that can hold me I will surrender myself.”

She gives him a long look. “You’re waiting for my orders?”

He takes in a deep breath and doesn’t answer.

For a long moment they just watch each other, and then his mother says, “There are supplies on board. The interior has been thoroughly cleaned.”

 _And searched,_ she doesn’t have to say that part.

Then she clears her throat. “I thought, perhaps. In the morning.” _If you’re still here_. “I could… join you. For breakfast.”

“I’m still not much of a cook,” he says after a moment, “but I’ll look forward to it.”

 

 

 

“I know where this ship came from, you know,” Rey says, and manages to make it an accusation.

Ben glances over his shoulder at her. She’s standing just inside the ship’s external doors, arms folded tightly across her chest, almost vibrating with mistrust.

“I tracked down the registration papers, which were obviously fake, but you hadn’t thought about changing the numbers for all of the major components,” she challenges.

“I’ll be sure to remember that for the next time I need to go on the run,” Ben says and turns away as if in dismissal.

“Does your mother know you arrived here on a slaver ship?” She asks, lip curling. His stomach churns at the necessity, but this is good, she is angry and full of suspicion. He needs her to stay on that path.

“Not unless you’ve already told her. _Have_ you told her?”

She glares at him. “I _should_.”

“You should,” Ben agrees.

“Did you steal it?” She demands suddenly. “Because there’s no way Kylo Ren was bothering with something as small-time as snatching individuals from their families.”

“No,” Ben agrees. “It’s much more Kylo Ren’s style to enslave entire planets.”

“So you stole it.”

“Or perhaps they were friends of mine,” he says, baring his teeth. “You do meet so many interesting people as part of the First Order.”

“You forget,” she says suddenly, “I’ve been in your mind.”

 _I’ll never forget,_ he thinks, taken aback by the switch in topic. His touchstone is there at the centre of his mind, black and sleek and perfect.

“And if there was one thing that was obvious from looking around in there, it was that Kylo Ren didn’t _have_ any friends.”

“Isn’t it nice,” he shot back, “that you and I have so much in common?”

Stupid. _Stupid_ that the remark stung so badly. And now he can tell he has stung her, too. Ben sighs and stares down at his hands as she storms down the ship’s ramp and away. This is why he shouldn’t entertain ridiculous daydreams about the kind of connection he and Rey could make. Even when he’s in no danger and under no real stress, he hurts her.

 

 


	14. Chapter 14

 

Over the next few days he keeps to the ship unless summoned. There are more briefings, this time with updates on casualties, so obviously the Rebellion have been busy striking at First Order targets based on Ben’s information. If he had to guess he’d say the First Order is almost half of what it was when he left, and what’s almost important is that unaligned planets are taking notice, and beginning to join the Rebel’s side. The tide is turning.

“They’re going to notice the common thread to our intel,” a Mon Calamar says. “We’ve used Kylo Ren’s passcodes twice now. Granted, both installations were destroyed in the attacks, but we can’t count on them not being able to retrieve data from the debris, or that no messages were sent back to base.”

“Agreed,” his mother says. “We need to have backup plans in place in case Ben’s codes stop working. Happily, we gather more defectors by the day.”

It’s interesting. His mother now refers to him exclusively as Ben, even in public meetings. He hugs that simple acknowledgement close on the long nights alone on his ship. Almost the entire rest of the Rebels still refer to Kylo Ren as the source of the intel, but a handful have begun calling him Ben when they address him. The majority, however, still glare at him with open hatred, and don’t speak to him directly at all.

“The one thing they won’t be able to swiftly change are the locations for things like shield generators and power sources,” Ben says. “The First Order builds on such a scale that the accompanying infrastructure is enormous. They do, however, tend to build more than they need, because they’ve always had to account for possible sabotage or technical failure. If my codes begin to fail, you could focus your attacks on those installations, but keep in mind you will almost certainly have to destroy more than one to make an impact.”

There are nods around the table, and the conversation moves on.

 

 

Luke is waiting for him when the meeting ends.

“Walk with me,” he says, and the tone is mid-way between a command and a question.

Ben falls in at his side.

“When I was in your mind I wasn’t only delving for memories,” Luke begins without hesitation. “I was looking for signs of Snoke’s influence, or his continuing presence.”

Ben’s feet stop without warning. “What?”

Luke doesn’t falter. His eyes are fixed on the walkway ahead of them, leading through the trees at the dizzying heights Ben was so enamoured of as a child. “I told you, Snoke could not have done what he did without prior contact, without some kind of door he’d created.”

“And- what did you find?” Ben rushed to catch up. He is filled with retrospective terror at the thought of Snoke lying hidden in his mind, like a snake.

“He is gone from your mind,” Luke murmurs. “You need not fear he can influence you against your will again. But I am curious as to how this freedom was achieved. Because Snoke has left behind clear signs of his… _hold_ on your will, and your thoughts. And there are very few techniques which would fend off the kind of influence he had on your mind.”

“Signs?” Ben repeats dumbly. He shies away from the way Luke says _techniques_. He doesn’t want to talk about what changed him.

“Scars, I suppose, you could call them,” Luke says, as if they are discussing the weather. He stops, suddenly and turns to face Ben, his eyes intent. “I do not say this so that you can absolve yourself of responsibility. Snoke influenced you from a young age, that much is clear. He led you down a path that would have eventually led to your utter destruction.”

“That’s what Dad said,” the words slip from Ben involuntarily.

Luke looks away and is silent for a time. His false hand flexes in what seems to be an unconscious gesture.

“Snoke influenced you,” he repeats. “He enticed you to the Dark Side, and he certainly succeeded in making you believe that he was the only person who could properly teach or guide you.” There’s a shadow of something there in Luke’s tone of voice, but it’s gone before Ben can parse it.

“But the orders he gave, _you_ chose to carry out. And the methods you chose were yours, Ben. Every cruelty, small or great, every act of torture, every unnecessary death should still lie heavy on your conscience, because they are _your_ victims, not Snoke’s. Do you understand me?”

“I understand,” Ben says numbly.

“I would like for you to join Rey in her training today.” Luke continues without any warning.

_“What?”_ Ben says, aghast.

“I think she could learn much from observing you.”

“Are you _insane?_ What could she possibly learn from me other than cruelty and horror?”

Luke regards him levelly, “I understand your concerns, nonetheless I think this could be a valuable learning exercise.”

“I- no. Uncle, no this is wrong. I can’t.”

“You’re afraid,” Luke says, and tips his head to regard Ben curiously.

He doesn’t waste time on denial, says instead, “And as we all know, fear leads to anger and anger leads to hatred. Rey hates me enough already, I’d rather not be the one to goad her any further down that path. I’m not sure my soul can bear any more guilt.”

For a long moment they stare at one another, and then Luke says, “Why do you think we ask permission to enter another person’s mind?”

Ben blinks at the change in topic. “Tradition? Good manners?”

“It is a largely symbolic question, in a situation such as ours. However, as I mentioned, symbols have their own kind of power. By granting me permission to share your mind, you are subconsciously allowing me a deeper level of access than I might otherwise be able to obtain. A deeper level than someone like, say, Snoke, could reach – despite his powers and your years of connection.”

Ben frowns, not liking the sound of this. “What are you saying?”

“Simply, that there are parts of your mind Snoke could never reach, because any communication between you was _taken_ by Snoke, and not voluntarily shared by you. I would never violate your privacy, but because you were open to my presence, your mind was necessarily more open to me.”

“I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, Uncle.” But his heart is beating hard. Nervous.

This time, Luke half-smiles. “I am saying, _Ben,_ that I will not let you avoid Rey forever.” He inclines his head in a mocking half-bow, turns on his heel and walks away.

 

 

He doesn’t even make it all the way up the ramp before he’s waylaid again. This time someone is waiting just inside the ship’s doors. “You love her,” the pilot says in wonder.

Ben manages not to gape. Instead he raises a brow. His heart starts a quick thud in his chest, but he finishes climbing and gets all the way inside the ship’s outer doors, keeps on walking as though the man will just fade away.

Instead, he follows. “Rey. You love her.” Now he sounds more certain.

“Why Captain Dameron,” Ben manages. “I didn’t realise Rebel pilots could afford such romanticism.” Why? Why is this happening _now?_ He’s already off-balance at Luke’s enigmatic hints, and now _this?_ It had never occurred to him that any of these people, his former enemies, might consider _Kylo Ren_ capable of genuine emotion.

“Then explain to me what you did that day in the shipyard.”

Ben sighed as if in impatience. “I have thrown my lot in with the Rebellion,” he points out. “She is one of the Rebellion’s strongest assets. My survival could well depend on _her_ survival.”

“Ah-huh,” he says, slowly thoughtfully. “Yeah. That really looked like a cold-blooded assessment of her value to the Rebellion, when you were flinging yourself down the chute yesterday all steely-eyed and _it doesn’t matter if I survive_.”

Ben says nothing, just drops into the co-pilot’s seat. There’s nothing _to_ say. He had, indeed, given himself away yesterday, for anyone who cared to look closely. Doesn’t mean he’s going to admit it to this pilot.

“So… you love her, but you’re not gonna say anything about it.” Dameron props one shoulder against the wall, all casual slouches and sharp eyes.

“We’re in the middle of a war, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Ben says. “It’s hardly the time for distractions.” It’s a concession, but it’s the only one he’ll make.

“It’s _exactly_ the time,” Dameron counters. “Either of you could die any minute. _Carpe_ that _diem,_ pal.”

“I’m not your pal,” Ben says, sharp.

“No, you’re not. You’ve made real sure that nobody here gets anywhere near to knowing you, or liking you. My guess is it’s the only way you can make sure Rey keeps her distance.”

“Goodness,” Ben says, mock breathless, “handsome _and_ inciteful. Yes, Captain Dameron, you’ve seen right through me. All I need is the love of a good woman and my past is wiped clean, I am remade and-”

“Never said your past would be wiped clean, pal,” he retorts, steely. “Though it’s nice to hear you think I’m handsome. Reach a certain age and you start wondering if you’ve still got it, ya’know?”

“Then you’re suggesting– what, exactly?” Ben bites out, a little startled by his own anger. “That I declare my undying love for Rey and sweep her into a romance so that her friends can either begin to doubt her loyalty to the Rebellion, or alternatively loathe her for forgetting about my crimes and choosing to sleep with the Master of the Knights of Ren. Is _that_ the future I should offer your friend? These people hate me, _and they are right to hate me_. Why on earth would you wish that upon Rey?” He’s almost panting by the time he’s done.

“That’s why?” Poe says quietly. “That’s why you won’t say anything?”

“There’s nothing to be said,” Ben says dully. “Even if you were right about my feelings. There’s nowhere for this to go, no way for it to become anything but an ugly burden for her. Awkward at best, destructive at worst.”

For a moment the Rebel pilot just watches Ben. Then he says, “I gotta tell you, I am really struggling to line up the guy who murdered a whole village to find me with this heroic sacrifice thing you’ve got going on. There’s a big part of me that won’t be surprised at all if you turn around one day and slaughter us all, including Rey, because you were faking all along.”

For a moment Ben can’t identify what he’s feeling. Then he realizes. It’s _camaraderie_. “Congratulations, Captain Dameron,” he says dryly. “That kind of paranoia means you just might end up surviving this war after all.”

Poe snorts. His mouth twists wryly as he pushes off the wall and starts walking. “Don’t make me like you, pal. This situation is already confusing enough.”

 

 


	15. Chapter 15

 

“You are keeping a secret.”

Ben freezes. Then he lifts his eyes to meet his uncle’s patient gaze. “I’m not sure what…?”

“I told you, your permission allowed me to delve much deeper than Snoke ever could. I’m sure he simply saw a darkness at the centre of your psyche, something devoid of light, something unremarkable. He saw what you wanted him to see – that you had forever forsaken the Light.”

He stares at Luke. How does Luke even _know_ -

“But I see through that, Ben. I can tell the darkness at the centre of your mind is something you’ve constructed there. It’s not an absence of Light, it’s a disguise. And whatever is beneath that disguise is precious. It’s _beautiful_ to you.”

“How-” he began, hoarse, then stops, floundering.

“I won’t intrude,” Luke says. “I won’t force you to show it to me. But I’m sure you understand that until you’ve opened your mind to me, I can’t fully trust you. I can’t risk taking you back to a Rebel base, or giving you true freedom of movement until I’ve truly seen what you’re protecting.” He gives Ben a long look and adds, “As things stand, I cannot tell your mother that I am sure of your intentions.”

_Oh, that’s just playing dirty_ , Ben thinks with admiration. For a long time no-one speaks. “It’s not- it’s nothing _bad_ ,” Ben begins.

“Yes, I could feel that much,” Luke says tranquilly.

“It’s… private.”

Luke nodded again. Ben bends his head and stares down at his hands.

“Take your time thinking about it,” Luke says. “This is not a demand. I simply wanted you to know that I know.”

 

 

Of course, it’s pretty much all he can think about, after that. He stops in the middle of the ship’s passageway and lets out a reluctant half-laugh. _Luke._

 

 

He seeks out his uncle out two days later, and gives him a wry look that Luke has no problem interpreting, judging from the twinkle in his eye.

“You were always a curious child,” is all Luke says.

Ben draws in a long, deep breath. “I don’t understand _how_ it happened,” he replies. “That’s the thing that bothers me most. I don’t know if I did something, caused some damage-”

“You are speaking now of Rey.”

Ben swallows. Even now he can’t say it. “Let me show you,” he says instead.

Luke eyes him, but allows the side-step.

They face one another again, and Luke lifts his hands to Ben’s. “Will you give me permission to access your mind?” he asks.

Ben swallows again. He places his palms atop his uncle’s. “Unreservedly,” he says, voice low.

Luke’s eyes flash to his and he’s

_/standing over a slip of a girl on the Finalizer_

_/saying_ Don’t be afraid, I feel it too

_/wishing things could be different_

_/showing his face for no reason_

_/taking what he needs_

_/sharing her loneliness_

_/seeing Han Solo through her eyes_

_/feeling her inside_ his _mind_

_/recoiling from her insight_

_/reporting to Snoke_

_/finding her gone_

_/feeling different, feeling_ something

It’s not enough, Ben knows that, and he tightens his hands over his uncles and reaches out to take control of their shared vision.

_I don’t know if I’ll be able to show you,_ he says, uncertain and honest in his head as he almost never is outside it _. I want to, but it’s so…_

_It’s been a precious secret to you for some time now. I understand_

_It’s so beautiful._ Then he takes a breath and amends _,_ she’s _so beautiful. Oh Luke, you’ve seen her soul. She_ shines

_You feel regret that you ever touched her mind at all?_

_Not… regret. I can’t regret it when she left me-_

_Ah, no, I see. Not regret but fear. That you-_

_A soul like mine. I stain everything I touch_

_No, Ben, you’re wrong. If your soul were truly so blackened this could never have happened_

 

And now Luke is somehow with him, staring at the perfect black gleam of Ben’s secret. His touchstone has grown larger with every day that he stays away from the First Order.

For a moment he wants to close his hands over it and hug it to his heart, push Luke out, hide it away. Instead, he leans close and within his mind he whispers, _Rey_

It begins with pinpricks of light, widening into eggshell cracks, golden fractures running around the edges and then the hard black shell begins to drop off, piece by piece, leaving only the purest golden glow at the centre of Ben’s mind. It’s green at the centre, that flush of living things.

_Name it,_ Luke tells him. _Names have power, and you shouldn’t hide this away behind a shield of darkness. This has brought you home to us, Ben, has set you and possibly the galaxy on another path entirely_

_I can’t,_ he pleads. _You_ know _I can’t_

_You must be able to be honest within the confines of your own mind_ , Luke admonishes. _I understand your reluctance out there in the world, but in here you must be able to see your own naked thoughts, Ben, without artifice or resorting to metaphor. Such self-deception can be dangerous. You are no longer exposed to someone like Snoke, who would have plundered your mind without remorse or care. You can admit what this is, what it means, what you want_

_I love her_ , Ben gasped. That’s not what Luke wants, of course, but to him it encapsulates everything.

“I love her,” he says aloud, and it shocks them both out of the link.

They regard one another for a long time, hands dropping, and then Luke says quietly, “It’s a start.”

 

 

 

It’s hours later and he is in the meals area of the ship, breaking a loaf of bread into portions when Luke drops into a chair opposite him.

Ben’s hands still, but he keeps his eyes down. His mother is due to join them soon for the evening meal, and he can already tell what his uncle wants.

“I’m not ready,” he says.

“I know you are fiercely protective of the emotions Rey has awakened in you,” Luke says. “I’m not here to argue about that.”

“You’re here to argue about something else, then.” Ben raises a brow.

Luke allows himself a smile.

“I think you should focus more about how this began, rather than the outcome.”

Ben frowns. He turns away and looks for something large enough to hold soup for three.

“Not where you are now, Ben, but what you felt, what happened between the two of you in that interrogation room.  Your feelings have grown since, but that tiny seed you showed me, it was created not from emotion, but by the Force.”

Ben swallows. He’s been careful not to focus on that. That way lies hope, and madness. “If I tell mother that…”

“You’re afraid of what she will do next. What she might expect.”

Ben manages a shrug, and it’s the worst sort of lie. He’s not sure what would be worse – if his mother rushes headlong toward some romantic ideal for her son and her protégé, or if she recoils from the possibility and focuses on protecting Rey. Protecting Rey is what she _should_ focus on, of course. It’s what _Ben_ is focused on, after all.

But some small part of him wants his mother to show that she would let the world burn if it would benefit her only child. That small part that remembers her waving him goodbye when he was so young, sending him away to learn from Luke. He’d never really come home again, and even now he is a tolerated guest rather than a child returning to the nest.

“You should tell her,” Luke repeats.

He sighs. “I’ll think about it.”

Luke inclines his head in acknowledgement. His uncle has learned a new, subtle form of battle in the years of his exile. He knows full well he has convinced Ben to do his bidding.

At the door Luke pauses. “Make sure your things are packed by morning,” he tells Ben. “We’ll be returning to our base, and you’ll be travelling with me.”

Ben blinks at him, then draws in a deep breath. His whole life seems to be a series of tests he’s not aware of until after they’re over.

 

 


	16. Chapter 16

 

 

Just to be contrary, Ben doesn’t do it straight away, even though there’s plenty of time as the ships are prepped for travel and the Wookies give their farewells. He waits until they’re planetside again at the new Rebel base, and he’s settled in quarters down the corridor from Luke. In the dim light of morning Ben walks across to his mother’s quarters, knowing that they won’t be interrupted. If he concentrates very hard he can tell that Rey on the other side of the base this morning, working with the mechanics to identify parts that can be used across different ships for repair.

His mother leads him through her rooms to the large window that frames the view of the mountains like a work of art. They sit, and she looks at him enquiringly.

“Mother.” Ben swallows. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

He focuses on her hands, clasped between her knees. “I need to tell you… how I came to be here. What changed.”

In his peripheral vision he sees her straighten. “Ben,” she says, and nothing more.

“It’s important you understand. I was – I was lost in the Dark Side, that much is true. That side of the Force came so easily to me. But I. I always felt the pull of the Light. All those years.” He swallows, risks a glance upwards. Her eyes are fixed on his, her face tight. “Everything was reversed for me. That call to the Light, it was something I was duty-bound to _fight_. I used to ask my grandfather for help – to resist, I mean.”

“But why did you _need_ to resist?” She asks quietly.

“Because if I gave in to the Light I couldn’t secure his legacy – Darth Vader’s legacy.”

She winces.

He’s heard Luke speak calmly of the dual nature of his father, of the two men, Anakin and Vader as if they are separate. He’s never heard his mother do the same. Darth Vader as her father is something she has never embraced.

“I thought it was all that was left for me,” he explains, beseeching. “And when – well.” He takes a deep, shuddering breath. “I thought Vader had sent me the ultimate test. That if I did– did what he would have wanted, I would finally be worthy.”

Her face closes off. She understands that he is alluding to his father, no matter how obliquely.

“But something else happened instead. I didn’t even recognise it at first.”

She doesn’t respond. He reaches out and takes one of her hands in his. It’s only the second time he’s touched her since he came back.

“When I interrogated Rey, on my ship.”

Leia’s eyes lift to his, startled and wary. For a brief moment Ben remembers something he’d discovered in researching his grandfather. Darth Vader tortured Princess Leia when the Empire had been trying to retrieve the stolen Death Star plans. His mother had once spent time in an interrogation chair the same way Rey had, and he feels sick at the reminder. He shifts his hold, his much larger hands swamping her smaller one, and hopes she can feel his remorse in the basic comfort of touch.

“I felt something. A spark. I thought – well, I thought a lot of stupid things, to be honest. But the point is, after _Starkiller._ I was injured, and when I meditated during my recovery, when I looked inside my own mind, I realized what had happened.”

“What?”

“She had reignited my connection to the Light,” he says simply. “The spark that is in her passed into me. I can’t think of any other way to phrase it.”

His mother’s breath catches and she squeezes his hand.

“My mind-” he says slowly, and closes his eyes. “It had been so desolate and Dark, Mother. And then, instead, there was a glow. Warm and bright and beautiful.”

“Ben,” his mother says slowly. “That sounds like-”

“I know what it sounds like,” he breaks in, eyes opening. “But it’s not. Mother, it’s really not. And it can’t ever be.”

“Ben-”

“Think for a minute,” he says quietly. Keeps himself calm. “Think about what that would mean for _her_.”

He watches her blink, troubled.

“That kind of bond is unbreakable. For the _rest of her life_ ,” Ben presses. “Would you really wish that upon her?”

She turns her head away, though he can see the stubborn line in her brows.

“Surely this is enough?” He pleads. “She brought me back to you, Mother. She showed me _myself_ again. I have been useful again – to you, to the Rebellion. I am speaking with Luke, I’ve seen Chewie, just sitting here with you now… It’s more than I ever could have asked for.”

There are tears in his mother’s eyes, and she reaches out tentatively. Ben gives in to the impulse he’s felt since he was first in that cell, and throws his arms around his mother, buries his face against her neck and holds on tight.

 

 

 

Of course, it’s not over. Ben didn’t get his stubborn nature from his father only, after all.

“You’re just as capable of love as anyone else,” his mother tells him, one afternoon, and she doesn’t even bother to try and lead up to it gently.

He throws her a speaking look, which she ignores.

Ben sighs. “Mother, even if she felt something for me, which she _doesn’t_ , would you honestly want me to exploit a bond that formed whilst I had her in an interrogation chair and was trying to rip a secret from her mind? I _tortured_ her, Mother.”

She flinches a little at that, but rallies. “And have you apologised?”

He blinks at her. “What?”

“Have you apologised for what you did when she was your prisoner?”

“I-well, I- no,” he finally says.

She raises her brows, triumphant, and he sighs. “Very well. I’ll apologise. It’s not going to make a difference.”

 


	17. Chapter 17

 

 

Poe is observant. It’s partly a pilot thing – gotta be able to recognise friend from foe when you drop out of light-speed into the middle of a dogfight, after all – and it’s partly from being the youngest of five. He’d always known before anyone else if his brothers had broken a rule or found a new paramour.

So, he’s observant, and that’s why he’s casually lingering in the corridor just outside the dining hall in the middle of breakfast shift.

Rey is habitually late to breakfast. Maybe those years on Jakku got her used to rising only when the air hit a certain level of warmth, or maybe it’s just a reaction to finally being able to sleep somewhere safe and know the food will still be there when you rise. Either way, she’s not the earlybird Poe had originally expected. But whether she’s early or she’s late, Poe has observed that Ben Solo somehow always manages to arrive at breakfast precisely early enough that Rey can claim a seat at their table just as the former Knight of Ren gets up and leaves.

So today he’s here to run an experiment.

He hears the clipped pace of steps that belong to only one person on this base, and turns so that he’s moving into the dining hall just as Solo falls in behind.

He glances over his shoulder, casual. “Hey,” he offers, with a jerk of his chin. He collects a plate and joins the line.

Solo nods back and says nothing, just collects his own plate.

They stand in line together and shuffle along with all the other hungry folk. Poe eyes the basket of rolls halfway along and sees with satisfaction that there are only three of the grey _vati_ rolls left. He’s prepared to take two and possibly get a reputation for gluttony, but luck is on his side and the redheaded technician ahead of him snags one, so Poe only needs to take one for himself and then watch what happens out of the corner of his eye.

Solo hesitates for a bare half-second, then reaches out to take one of the rolls and place it on his plate.

Poe would be willing to be a considerable amount of credits that Solo _hates_ those rolls. There’s something in the way his face angles away from the bread as he eats the rest of his breakfast, but leaves the roll untouched.

Poe sits opposite him, as he’s been doing for a week now, and ignores the glares of the other diners. Sure enough, Solo gets to his feet just as Rey appears in the doorway, and he takes his plate to the clearing station without looking in anyone’s direction.

The _vati_ roll is left behind, right in the spot where Rey drops down to eat.

“Hey!” she exclaims, spotting the roll, and she grabs it in one hand. “My favourite.” She bites into it with relish, those even white teeth flashing.

“Are they,” Poe says, musingly. He turns his head just in time to see Solo’s black-clad back disappear through the doorway.

 

 

 

 

 

Rey watches him as discreetly as she can. It’s become a habit now, maintaining this awareness of where Kylo Ren is at all times. Sometimes she’d swear she can sense his mind, when she’s meditating with Luke, or running through the defensive forms. It feels so different, though, from the compulsion that had barrelled through her thoughts on the _Starkiller_ base that she doubts herself.

Perhaps he _has_ changed. The results of his intel on the First Order are certainly undeniable, by now even she has to grudgingly admit it does seem as though his help for the Rebellion is genuine. But people don’t change _that_ much.

That sense of connection on the fringes of her mind is probably only because he’s another Force user, and she’s seen him doing the same exercises. Sometimes he and Luke and moving through the patterns when she arrives for her own training, and it’s fascinating to watch the two bodies, their styles so different, completing the same sequences. He has a precision that eludes her, a sense of coiled power that shows in every move.

Each day when they finish, Luke tells him, “You’re welcome to stay, Ben.”

Rey always recoils on the inside when she hears Luke call him by that name. He’s _not_ Ben Solo. He’s the monster who killed Han Solo. He can repent as much as he likes, but he _can’t take that back_.

He always refuses. He bows to Luke, nods to Rey, and takes himself off, every time.

She’s glad. She doesn’t want to learn _anything_ from Kylo Ren.

And yet, every time, she watches him go.

 

One day at their usual crossover time as he is leaving and she is arriving, out of the clear blue sky Kylo Ren stops mid-bow and says. “On _Starkiller_. When I-”

He swallows and finishes, “When I held you prisoner.”

Rey stares blankly at him.

“I apologise. For what I did. I’m sorry. For the pain I caused you.”

He meets her eyes as he finishes speaking, and holds her gaze for one long moment. Rey just stares back, noting the high colour in his cheeks.

He nods at her. Nods at Luke. Leaves.

She is left blinking after him, then turns to stare a Luke, as if he might be able to explain this bizarre behaviour.

Luke, she is confused to see, seems to be biting back a smile.

 


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rating goes up a teensy bit.

 

 

Ben’s reintegration into wider society within the Rebellion has been largely low-key. Most of the operatives who deal in front-line intelligence are fairly accepting. When he thinks about it, there must be more than a few of their number who have changed sides themselves or watched others do so. How else is inside information gained, after all?

There are many people in the Rebellion, he assumes, who don’t have the slightest clue who he is – in either of his lives. There are others who absolutely do, and send blistering, furious looks his way, leave the room when he enters, and make loud pointed remarks about murderers and genocidal maniacs who should be in prison, or will be put to death when all of this is over. Ben isn’t bothered by them, he’s more than aware that he has earned such abuse over and over again.

The ones he does resist, however, are those who start physical altercations.

Not because he doesn’t think he deserves that, too, but it upsets his mother. It also causes more drama inside the base. Unlikely as it may seem there were a _few_ things he learned in the First Order that had some value, and one of them is that discipline is a necessary requirement for the troops in any army. That means they can’t be permitted to hand out punishment based on their emotional reactions.

So he’s fending off several angry soldiers with the Force, while they scream abuse at him. He’s hoping that the screaming will let off enough steam that he’ll eventually be able to release them and go about his daily life.

Poe Dameron strolls around the corner, hands in his pockets. “Hey,” he greets Ben, with a lift of his chin. He stops at Ben’s side and regards the five struggling soldiers. “This happen a lot?”

“Not really,” Ben says.

Dameron nods. “Hey. _Hey_ , fellas,” he calls, raising his voice slightly. “You guys having a good time there?”

“…this piece of filth walks around like-”

“Yeah, I get that you’re pissed,” Dameron agrees. “I get that. But do you guys get that we’re winning the war right now because of him?”

Ben indulges himself a little and forces their heads – gently – to turn toward Dameron.

“I’m not saying that what he did in the past is okay. But I am saying to you that we might actually defeat Snoke and the First Order sometime this year. Actually _defeat_ them. And it’s because of him, and the intel he’s been feeding us. So you could maybe just give him a wide berth. How ‘bout that? Can you fellas do that?”

“-just because he’s the General’s son-”

_“Don’t_ talk about my mother,” Ben says sharply, and he grips that one’s throat with the Force, just for a second, enough to be a warning.

“Yeah, I wouldn’t do that,” Poe says, still super casual, but Ben can feel in the Force that he is one part amusement and more than half low-grade worry. “For a start, the General has given more to this cause than anyone I can think of, going back since before any of you were born. Plus, every decision that’s been made about this guy has been agreed to by the leadership committee, so blaming the General is just plain dumb.”

By now three of the soldiers have stopped struggling and are silently hanging in Ben’s grip. He lowers them to the ground and releases them and they back away, annoyed but no longer dangerous. The other two resume their cursing, but as their friends begin to intercede they quieten, and Ben is eventually able to let them go as well.

“I understand your hatred,” he tells them as they turn to stalk away. “If you want to let off steam I’m happy to spar with you any time.”

The one who started things, the angriest man, turns. He glares at Ben.

“No Force,” Ben says. “Just a clean honest fight.” And then he smiles, the wide shark’s smile that he knows disconcerts people. “All of you at once, if you like.”

The soldier curls his lip and walks away, friends falling in to flank him.

Dameron turns his head to stare at Ben, head tilted. “You’re kidding.”

Ben raises an eyebrow.

“You’re not kidding. You’re going to let five of them kick the crap out of you.”

“I’ve faced worse odds,” Ben says without thinking. “Snoke liked to use pain as a teaching tool. Besides, who says they’re going to kick the crap out of me?”

Dameron rocks back on his heels a little. “Hm. Y’know, I’ve been hearing about a little ‘covert action’ that took place back on Kashyyyk. Bunch of idiots walking around trying to pretend they got their bruises and strains from some kind of fall-”

Ben just waits. Now it’s Dameron’s turn to raise an eyebrow. Ben shrugs and looks away, “Yes, well. At least this time they won’t be carrying any weapons.”

“ _And_ this time you will let me know where and when it’s happening so that I can watch your back,” Poe says, eyes never leaving Ben’s face.

Ben’s eyes flick to his, startled. For a moment they just stare at one another and then Ben swallows. Poe’s demeanour is so easy, so relaxed. Ben has become used to these conversations, the quiet way Dameron builds bridges between them. He’s become used to them, but underneath has always suspected it’s a way of …checking up on Ben, of making sure he doesn’t stray from the path, or a way of monitoring potential problems. It would make sense for Luke to assign him some kind of handler – or for his worried mother to try and arrange for some healthy human contact.

But _this_ – there’s no other way to interpret this. This is a gesture of friendship, naked and sincere.

“I- yes,” Ben manages hoarsely. His chest is tight, breath beginning to come too fast. “I will. If you want.”

“I do want,” Poe replies, and those eyes are full of understanding, older than his years.

Ben manages a sharp nod and flees before he says something utterly stupid.

 

 

_The dream is strange. Nothing like any of his usual dreams. He sees himself, from outside his body. He is walking around the edge of an abandoned ship from the days of the Empire. It is half-buried in sand, torn open on one side, worn with time._

_His black clad figure turns a corner and enters the ship through what would once have been the intake tube of a cooling tower, and in this new landscape is an oddly perfect tunnel leading into the cool, dark depths._

_Once he gets further inside it becomes clear he is looking for something. His head turns side to side, footsteps deliberately quiet, until finally he pauses, waits, and then, shockingly, he grins._

_“Found you,” he murmurs, and whips out a hand to latch onto warm human flesh, an arm and a body hiding in the shadows._

_Rey laughs up at him as he draws her closer. “You cheated.” Her eyes are dancing, body relaxed as it bumps against his._

_“I always cheat,” he replies, and bends his head to hers._

_His mouth slants over hers and she hums against his lips, her strong, slender arms reaching up to coil around his neck. No hesitation, no reserve._

Ben jerks awake on a half-strangled noise. What on _earth-_

He is breathing heavily, heart pounding, and he is achingly, embarrassingly hard.

For a long few moments he just sits there, dumbfounded, staring at the stark white walls around him. He doesn’t – he’s _never_ –

He shakes his head. It’s not like he doesn’t feel things. Or have… _thoughts_. He does, of _course_ he does. But this had been-

His face is still hot from the memory of it. He’d been so _confident_ in the dream. So sure of his welcome. He can still remember the feeling of Rey’s body coming to rest against his with no resistance, no suspicion, only warmth and laughter. His skin prickles all over at the thought of it and Ben realizes suddenly that there is no possible way he is going to simply fall back to sleep.

He draws in a long breath, runs a hand over his face and climbs out of bed, trying unsuccessfully to ignore his erection.

He has long experience of ignoring these sensations – it wasn’t as though Snoke encouraged distractions for his Knights, after all. But just like the touchstone in the centre of his mind, all of his other feelings and reactions have intensified incredibly since he began to truly interact with others again. He has the sinking feeling that his libido, like his conscience, is reawakening for good.

He stalks across to the washroom tucked away beside his storage pod, strips off his clothes and steps under the spray. Eyes closed against the gentle flow of water, Ben bites his lip, then shrugs mentally and lets his hand slide down his chest to the hardness throbbing between his legs.

Gods, but just the touch of his own hand is unbelievably good. He can’t even remember the last time he did this, but doing it now, on the heels of that dream, with the water flowing over his skin and the ghost-memory of Rey, laughing up at him, her body soft and strong and pressing against him, the way he’d leaned down to her and her mouth had opened under his, warm and wet and-

Ben groans harshly, tightens his hand and comes.

 

 

 

It’s almost two days before Ben realizes, suddenly, that the _perspective_ in the dream had been all wrong. He’d been watching himself from the outside, and hadn’t seen Rey’s face clearly once. In the light of day, he’d realized that the ship they’d been on was obviously one of a hundred pieces of wreckage from Jakku, but not one Ben had ever seen. But the most compelling evidence of all was that Ben would never in a million years have dreamt himself to be some kind of confident lover, seducing Rey without hesitation or self-doubt.

That _hadn’t been his dream._

Blinking at the realization, stunned, Ben drops an entire carton of droid components on his foot in the middle of the maintenance bay, and doesn’t even notice the throbbing and bruises until he’s removing his boots after dinner that night.

 

He tries to offer a subtle warning to his uncle that it might be a good idea to step up Rey’s training on shielding, but he’s blushing so ridiculously at the memory of the dream that he can barely form any words at all. The Force alone knows what Luke managed to guess from Ben’s half-garbled hints.

Then Ben sets about very firmly reminding himself that dreams reveal nothing about a person’s actual thoughts and feelings, and are more likely to be a jumbled mess of half-formed impressions and past recollections than anything else.

It means nothing _. Nothing_.

 

 

 

At the end of her training one day Luke says without warning, “You’re curious about him.”

Rey’s eyes fly to his.

“If you have questions, you should ask them,” he adds. “Whether you want to ask me, or him, is up to you.”

“I don’t want to talk to him,” she says vehemently.

Luke raises his eyebrows. “He is often in your thoughts.”

“I’m on alert in case he betrays us,” she says, defensive.

Luke says nothing, just watches her with those sad eyes that have seen so much.

“How can you _forgive_ him?” she bursts out. All of her hard-won calm from an hour of meditation and reinforcing her shields is destroyed inside of a minute, just by the thought of Kylo Ren. “Not just for – for your friend, or all the other deaths. I know what he did to your Academy.”

Luke closes his eyes for a moment. “There are some wounds that fundamentally change us,” he says. “There are losses that can never be made right. Ben knows that.”

“ _And_ you call him _Ben-_ ”

“Rey,” Luke says quietly, and she breaks off, face hot. She’s being rude, and impulsive. Hardly a fitting display for a trainee Jedi.

“I’m sorry, Master Luke.”

“My nephew and I are on our own journey,” he says, very quiet. “Much as he is on a different journey with his mother. For most of the people in the Rebellion, Kylo Ren and Ben Solo are simply figures they have heard of in a story. Their reactions will be based on the stories they have heard, or the losses they have suffered. For family it’s not so simple.”

She concentrates on controlling her breathing and calming her mind.

“Your situation is more similar to mine and Leia’s. You met Han. You also met Kylo Ren. How you move through your grief and your anger about what happened is up to you. But pretending that you are unaffected is pointless and unwise,” Luke continues implacably.

She can feel her face heat.

“I know that none of this is easy.”

She swallows. This time, when she meets his eyes there is kindness there. “The situation is complicated. But if there is one principle I urge you to follow, Rey, it is to be honest with yourself. Believe it or not,” he says wryly, “I am giving my nephew the same advice. You must be brutally honest with yourself. Examine your reactions. Reflect on the reasons why your emotions take this particular path. Self-knowledge is a powerful tool that can protect you from the temptations of the Dark Side, and ease the way forward both in your training, and in your relationships.”

She swallows. “I- I’ll try, Master Luke.”

“There is great potential in you, Rey. And a strong will. I will teach you what I can. But you must be prepared to look within yourself and truly _see_. It was the hardest lesson I ever learned.”

 


	19. Chapter 19

 

She tries to take his advice. Tries to be honest with herself.

It’s dumb. She’s dreamed of him, of Kylo Ren, sometimes, like she’s still that lonely girl on Jakku. They’re mostly harmless and confusing dreams like the one where they’re playing hide and seek and the landscape shifts from a beach to the inside of a canyon somewhere, the walls towering over both of them, and when she turns to ask him a question he’s made it rain somehow, and tiny purple frogs burrow up out of the sand and hop around between their feet.

There was that one dream that wasn’t harmless, but was even _more_ confusing than the others. She replays that moment inside the wrecked ship far too often, when he’d leaned in close, grinning, and kissed her with such bold desire. There had been a long, not-quite-dimple creasing the right side of his cheek as he smiled, and for some reason that not-dimple obsessed her even more than the kiss.

He’d looked so harmless, so happy, so _young._

 _Why had she imagined him that way?_ Why had she woken up aching and aroused over _Kylo Ren?_

And then, just a week ago, she’d seen an image projected on to the frame on the desk in the General’s quarters. The three of them, Han and Leia and Ben, all much younger, Ben surely only twelve or so. And the smile on that face had been exactly the same – soft, open, with a long line framing the right hand side of his mouth.

_How had Rey known Kylo Ren could smile like that?_

 

 

“I don’t trust him,” she tells Master Luke.

“I know.”

“This could all be a trick,” she says. “Just… a way to wipe out the Rebellion once and for all.” Except she doesn’t really see how. The First Order are definitely failing. This morning they’d sat in on a small, tightly restricted briefing about the base where Snoke has pulled back to reinforce and regroup his remaining troops. They are so _close_ to taking out the Supreme Leader. And Kylo Ren’s information has brought them to this point.

She’s not the only one who doesn’t want to trust him, but then, as someone said this morning – results matter. And he is getting results. They have made progress these past months that would have taken most of a decade, probably. He hasn’t just suggested targets. He identified key targets, and then follow up hits on backup facilities to prevent them regrouping.

From here, the only double cross she could imagine is if he’s using them to gut Snoke’s forces, and planning to step into the power vacuum himself. But it doesn’t seem likely – what army would he inherit at this point? One that’s a shadow of its former self, with stormtroopers deserting in droves every day.

“It could be,” Luke allows. Then he waits.

Rey flattens her mouth into a line.

He waits.

“If it’s _not_ a trick,” she goes on, reluctant. “I don’t know. I don’t- if I can.” She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes. “Do I have to forgive him?” she entreats, looking up at her Master. “To be a true Jedi, I mean? Do I have to forget the things he’s done, the things I’ve watched him do?” she swallows. “Because I. I don’t know. If I can do that.”

Luke’s old eyes regard her. “What prevents you?”

“He _killed_ Han Solo _right in front of me_ ,” she snaps.

“And you had known the man less than a day,” Luke says quietly. “Dig deeper.”

She grits her teeth. She can feel the tears just behind her eyes but she won’t. She _won’t_. But he’s right. She can feel the unspoken words lodged like a stone in her chest. Not admitting it is dangerous. She takes  a deep breath, and her throat is aching with tension.

“I would have given _anything,”_ Rey grits out. “To have a _speck_ of what he had. To even have a true _memory_ of my parents.” Her hands clench into fists.

Luke holds her eyes. She stares at him, defiant. She’ll be honest. She’ll keep her word. But she _won’t_ cry. “He had _everything_. _EVERYTHING_. And even after everything he did, after all that betrayal, and _years_ of trying to destroy everything they built. Even _then_ they still wanted him. I heard Han. I _heard_ him, _begging_ for Ben to come back. To come _home._ ”

“Yes,” Luke prompts, still soft.

“And he k-killed him anyway. Looked him in the eyes and killed his own _f-father_ ,” Rey sobs. “And Han, he, he put his _hand_ ,” she can’t finish, breath coming choppy though her eyes are dry. She mimics the move, puts her own shaking hand on her face. “Even _then_ , Han reached out. More. He never gave up-”

“Rey.”

 _“Where were they?”_ she screams, shocking herself at the suddenness. “Where _were_ they- why didn’t they ever _come for me?_ What did I _do?_ Why didn’t they-” and she’s choking, the tears still locked behind her closed lids even as she beats her hands on her thighs. “What was _wrong_ with me that they _never,_ _no-one_ ever-”

Luke’s arms close around her and he pulls her close.

“Nothing is wrong with you,” he murmurs. “There was _never_ anything wrong with you, Rey. They didn’t come because they couldn’t. Because they were gone. Whoever they were, of that I’m sure, Rey. They made you as safe as they could. And you honoured their memory by surviving.”

She shakes and shakes in his arms for a long time. Finally, she stills her breathing, eyes fixed on the ground between them. She feels a little lighter. A little. But it’s an old hurt, and one she’ll always carry.

“I still don’t trust him,” she says once her heart has stopped its racing.

“I understand,” Luke replies. “And I agree we must plan accordingly.”

 

 

 

That night, Luke walks her to Leia’s quarters. Something unspoken seems to pass between them, some sort of understanding only twins have, perhaps, and Leia draws Rey down onto the seat beside her and talks softly of everyday things. She digs through a battered travel-trunk and draws out a necklace she apparently wore to some large ceremony that Rey can no doubt look up in the Rebellion records later, and urges Rey to try it on. Rey does, giggling, and runs her fingers over the smooth surface. She’s never _seen_ anything so fine. Her rough fingers don’t seem worthy, but Leia smiles at her, fond and proud and playful.

Luke remains for an hour or so, fashions some kind of drink that has an inviting taste that’s faintly sweet and a fragrance that’s sharply sour. Leia piles cushions on the floor beside her couch and Rey sprawls across them with a fresh drink in her hand and takes her hair out of its customary three buns. Leia’s soft fingers winnow through Rey’s hair, scratching at her scalp and making her eyes close in contentment.

Luke bids them goodnight and takes his leave. He dims the lights just enough that Rey can feel herself getting drowsy, and she falls asleep there in safety and comfort, wearing the jewels of a Princess, with a mother’s gentle touch combing through her hair.

In the morning they make their plans for the assault on the First Order’s final base.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ben’s sweet, adorable smile:  
> https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/e9/47/b7/e947b7b6247a52596514cd3b693bc007.jpg


	20. Chapter 20

 

“Why do you come here,” Ben asks wearily. “And don’t say it’s because I saved your life. I’ve taken many more lives than I’ve saved, and yours would have been one of them if you hadn’t managed to escape the _Finalizer_.”

“I get that you’re a guy who likes to be in control,” Dameron says. “I mean, really who doesn’t. But you don’t get to decide where other people spend their compassion, or offer friendship.”

“Compassion? That’s what this is?”

There’s a long silence.

“I see you,” Dameron finally says. “I do _see_ you, okay? I know you did monstrous, unforgivable things, some of them to me and some of them while I watched on helplessly. I’m not forgetting that. And I have had my own struggles with knowing all of that to be true, and still finding myself liking you. You, as a person, the person you are now.”

Ben’s chest is tight.

“You’re capable of love. That was pretty mindblowing – especially, I mean, well, Rey. You love your mother, that actually wasn’t such a big shocker, probably even _Snoke_ loved his mother when he was a little kid. You don’t get points for that. But what you feel for Rey, and what you do for Rey, that… surprised me. And so then I watched you. Waiting for the catch, because man, no way you were doing that for no reason. There had to be an angle.”

“But all I saw was you doing small things to smooth her way – tiny, _insignificant_ things, that she never noticed, that pretty much no-one else noticed. And the more I watched the more I saw, and the more I realized you weren’t doing it for credit, or to win her over, or anything else. You just do it because the way you feel about her demands you do it.”

There’s a long silence and then Poe says, “I loved a woman like that. A long time ago. It was the purest feeling I’ve ever known. She was untouchable to me – married to my best friend, actually – but that didn’t stop me wanting every good thing for her in this life.”

Ben swallows. Then has to clear his throat before he can say, “Where is she now?” _Please,_ he thinks to the universe, _please don’t let her be a victim of Kylo Ren_.

Poe smiles a sad smile. “She died in a shuttle crash. Total accident, just a faulty fuel cell.”

“I’m sorry,” Ben says after a moment.

“Not your fault,” Poe says, then visibly shakes off the sadness and slants a half-grin at Ben. “That one time, it actually was completely _not_ your fault.”

Ben cannot believe this guy is making a joke about his Kylo Ren past. “Look closer,” he replies without thinking. “I bet the First Order was invading the home planet of the worker building the fuel cell and for that reason he was distracted at work on that one day, and forgot something important.”

“Everything’s all your fault somehow, huh? That’s your position?”

Ben tilts his head in a _maybe_. “It does seem neater, doesn’t it?”

Poe shakes his head. “Shoulda known you’d have a dark sense of humour, Ben my old buddy.”

“Call me that again and I’ll rip your spine out,” Ben says conversationally.

Poe barks a laugh. “Yeah, sure you will, amigo.”

They sit in silence after that, and it’s easy.

 

 

 

They plan the attack on Snoke without Ben, of course. They’ve trusted his information thus far, but not entirely, and they are smart to do so. If he _were_ a saboteur, it wouldn’t be a particularly long game he’s played. It’s only just been more than a year since he sent that grenade spinning into a ship’s engine, and he could well be leading the Rebellion’s leaders into a trap.

Still, it’s not hard for him to read the troop movements and the briefings which exclude him, the specific personnel who disappear on scouting missions.

He spends long hours thinking things through, trying to imagine the strike they are planning, trying to think of the weaknesses, the possible mission flaws. Snoke is a tactician and he is utterly ruthless. What the Rebellion really needs is for the Supreme Leader to make a mistake.

Finally he goes to Luke.

“I understand it’s not wise to trust me on this,” he begins.

Luke stays as he is, in meditation pose, eyes closed. Ben presses his lips together, hard, and vows to keep his temper under control.

“I’m not asking for trust, or to be brought in on this mission, but I know you recognise this truth: that there is no-one else who understands Snoke better than I do.”

Luke’s eyes open slowly.

“You seek revenge,” he says.

“I want all of this to be _over_ ,” Ben replies, and, embarrassingly, his voice breaks a little as he says it. “And this will never be over while Snoke is alive. He will never stop his pursuit of power.”

“What is it that you want?”

Ben takes a breath. “He’s prideful. Full of spite. He will be furious at my defection – if he doesn’t know of it already, it would be a powerful distraction.”

Luke watches him.

“If you truly want to destroy Snoke,” Ben says, “you’ll dangle me in front of him like a big fat worm on a hook. There’s no way he’d be able to resist. It’s probably the one thing that would make him act impulsively, and give you an opening.”

“No-one in the Rebellion will agree to this,” Luke says. “But you already know that. It would sound uncomfortably like Kylo Ren attempting to return to his Master.”

“I’m not saying you need to actually take me to him,” Ben says, impatient. “You can lock me in a bunker at the bottom of the Firdian Sea if you like. But if he thinks I’m forming a team to assault his fortress, or gets information that I’m on a certain ship…” he trails off. Then says calmly, “He’ll want to do it himself. He’ll want to look me in the eye as he destroys me.”

“I agree,” Luke says.

“What?”

“I agree that you are the key to catching Snoke off-guard. But the problem remains the same. Even your mother’s influence wouldn’t get the council to agree to you being exposed to Snoke or the First Order. Also, there is the small point that Leia would never agree to put you in such jeopardy, not now.” _Now that she, possibly, has you back,_ Luke doesn’t say.

“Then can’t you arrange for a leak of information?” Ben asks. “Surely there must be suspected moles within the Rebellion. Let them hear of my defection, my fictional pursuit of Snoke.”

“It might be possible,” Luke says, and his eyes close again. “I’ll consider it.”

Ben stares at him, speechless, and realises he has been thoroughly dismissed.

 

 

He is passing through a corridor when it suddenly fills with people, and he thinks wryly that they might as well all have worn hats labelled Secret Meeting You Were Not Invited To, considering the combination of knowing looks and barely concealed panic that greeted him.

He falls back and lets them pass, which doesn’t exactly pan out well when he starts forward thinking the room is empty and bumps into Rey, who is followed by Finn and Poe.

She stops abruptly when she sees him.

For a moment the four of them stand frozen, and then, “Sorry,” Ben says, and falls back to make room.

_“Argh!”_ Rey says. Her eyes are snapping with fury.

He blinks at her, startled. Behind her, he sees Poe and Finn make almost identical wincing faces, and then begin to sidle away.

“So you think, what, you’ll just apologise for everything now?”

“Uh…”

“You can’t just be all ‘sorry’ out of nowhere and expect that to make everything okay.”

Ah. So this is about the other day. “I-”

“Apologising does _not_ make everything okay, _okay?_ ”

“I never expected it to,” Ben manages to get out in the face of this unexpected attack. She’s clearly been stewing about this for days.

Finn and Poe are almost at the end of the corridor by now. Lucky them.

“Then why even apologise in the first place?”

He hesitates. “I wronged you, and I needed to admit it.” Then, “And because my mother asked me to,” he finally says, voice low.

That leaves _her_ blinking at _him_ , mouth agape.

“I- I don’t even- what am I supposed to- _argh!”_ Rey throws her hands in the air and storms away, leaving Ben more confused than he’s felt in years.

 


	21. Chapter 21

 

 

He’s off balance from that encounter, and it leaves him circling around the question all day. He’d wronged Rey, yes. He’s wronged a lot of people. It’s not possible to apologise to them all, and the vast majority would sneer at it anyway.

But.

He sits in his room – brooding. He’s self-aware enough to admit _that_ much. Even without using the Force he can tell the base is gearing up for a major strike, the preparations are unmistakable and excitement and dread are almost palpable in the air. And he is brooding in his room, like the unhappy teenager he once was.

Ben swallows, then surges to his feet. He strides through the corridors, ignoring the looks from the people he passes. He rarely leaves his quarters at night, and any change in his routine causes suspicious looks. Luckily he doesn’t care what they think.

He finds the door he was looking for and takes another deep breath. It slides open and he finds himself face to face with Poe Dameron.

For a long moment they simply stare at one another, and Ben finds all the words locked up in his throat. He is sorry. He _is_ genuinely sorry for the things he did to this man. But Poe is the one person on this planet who might actually _accept_ his apology, and for some reason that makes it impossible to say.

“I-I’m-” he begins, and stops.

Dameron’s eyes travel over Ben’s face, reading things no-one else ever seems able to read. The slight frown on his face clears into surprise. One corner of his mouth turns up, and something warmer, something like respect shows in his eyes.

He waits. “I know,” he says, and reaches out to place a careful hand on Ben’s shoulder. “I know you are, buddy. I know.”

“You’re a good man,” Ben finds himself saying involuntarily. He swallows and says thickly, “Be careful out there.”

“I’ll try,” Poe says, and doesn’t offer a comforting lie. They both know what’s at stake, and what the odds are – even for an exceptional pilot. “I’ll keep an eye out for Rey, if I can,” he offers.

“That- that’s not why I-” Ben begins, oddly stricken.

Something passes over Dameron’s face, and then he smiles. “Okay. Well. I will anyway, okay?”

Ben nods once, Poe releases him, and they go their separate ways.

 

 

He doesn’t speak to Rey again before she flies out, which is no doubt for the best. He’s not sure how he could mess things up again, considering that even apologising seemed to make things worse, but somehow Ben would find a way. From across the hangar he watches them load the Falcon, and Rey’s refusal to look in his direction is almost a physical thing. Chewie meets his eyes, nods to him once, and Ben accepts it for the farewell it is.

He exchanges a sombre goodbye with his uncle, a silent, emotional hug with his mother, and watches them fly out in their various ships along with almost everyone else.

 

 

The one flaw in his clever plan, Ben thinks with grim humour, is that deliberately leaking information doesn’t in any way prevent another leak of other, better information. Clearly word did reach Snoke of Ben’s survival and defection, and it had drawn the Supreme Leader out of his base, just as they’d hoped.

What’s also clear now is that Snoke had been given the _actual_ facts – namely, that Ben would be left behind on a near-deserted base while the final attacks were launched against the First Order’s remaining base and ships.

A security panel near his head explodes in a shower of sparks and he flinches back from the blaster fire, which is getting uncomfortably close now. They are being unmistakably herded toward one end of the hangar, and if he’s not mistaken that building pressure in his head is the onrushing presence of Supreme Leader Snoke himself. The fury he is projecting rivals the sound his ship makes as it hovers into a neat landing at the far end of the Rebellion’s landing pad.

It’s a small mercy that he doesn’t have to worry about anyone he cares about being hurt here. His mother and Rey, along with nearly all the air and ground forces had already set out for the final strike at Snoke’s home base on the Outer Rim.

There was only a small detachment left behind to secure the base – and to guard Ben, naturally.

He really should have realized what an easy target it made him, but his focus had been entirely on feeding comm transmissions and fake orders to his supposed Rebel ‘team’ as they made their way through the defences on Snoke’s base.

“If you get those _ysalamir_ out of here,” Ben grits out to the handful of guards that are left, “I can _help_ you, do you understand?”

“Keen to get back to your Master, Kylo Ren?” one of them spits, firing wildly behind them. “The only reason we haven’t killed you ourselves is that the families of the dead deserve to see you stand trial when all of this is over.”

Ben closes his eyes and curses his life, the universe, and the Force itself. What is the point of any of the choices he’s made recently if it’s all going to end like this? It’s wasteful, and stupid, and he refuses to die from something as ridiculous as _mistrust_ when he actually survived working for the First Order, _and_ leaving them.

 _“Fine,”_ he spits out. “I’ll do it the old fashioned way, then.”

He’s up and running before any of them can catch him. He zigzags across a corridor, blaster fire on his heels – probably from both sides of this battle, he thinks wryly. He reaches the shelter of a doorway with an intact security panel. He shakes his head to cast off the weird pressing on his mind that is his former Master’s rage, and rips the cover off the panel with his bare fingers. _Anger does have its uses,_ he thinks wryly.

It doesn’t take much finesse to open the doors behind the spot where his guards are waiting, though they all hesitate and glare at him before they retreat through it to better cover. Ben rolls his eyes and digs deeper into the circuitry. The door beside his position is half-melted from a ship’s laser blasts, and won’t be opening anytime soon, but he finally gets a hatch in the ceiling open. He drags himself up and through and starts his awkward, wriggling progress through the ducts to safer ground.

He’s more familiar with the base than Snoke’s men, which is one advantage, and he’s also moving further away from the perimeter of _ysalamir_ with every few seconds, which is another. Ben circles around the immediate blast zone and hears with weary fatalism the sound of another ship, and then another, coming in to land.

Snoke is serious about taking him alive, then. He could have just blasted the base from orbit, but this many ships sounds like a true landing force.

He makes it a few meters further along the ducts before he realizes that one of the ships had sounded dreadfully familiar.

The Falcon. He freezes for a second, blinking.

No. It can’t be. Rey and Chewie and her two buddies had set off a whole two days before the rest of the Rebel fleet. There had been no chance to say farewell, and Ben had spent the entire rest of the day wondering if he dared to try and pray to any deity anywhere that Rey and his mother, at the very least, made it through the next few days. He doesn’t dare to hope for anyone else’s survival. He’s already asking for more good fortune than he deserves.

Then he squeezes round a corner and spots a familiar figure making his way down a corridor, heading straight to the spot where some of Snoke’s well-armed troops are crouched, waiting. Ben  throws up a hand just as the stormtroopers fire. Poe stumbles to a halt, staring wide-eyed at the five frozen blaster bolts arrayed in front of his head and chest for a half-second before he fires and takes the stormtroopers down. Then he glances cautiously around him.

For one brief moment Ben is tempted to simply move on, then he shakes his head at himself and taps on the grate. Dameron looks up. “Where is she,” Ben demands, keeping his voice low.

Dameron blinks at him, then half-grins and slides carefully past the frozen bolts. “Hunting for Snoke, where else?”

Ben snarls at the thought of it. “Snoke is _mine.”_

“Looks like it’s a race to the finish, then, doesn’t it?” he wiggles his eyebrows at Ben, who bares his teeth and is just mean enough to let go of his control of the bolts and let them smash into the wall behind the pilot. Dameron jumps, but doesn’t lose his grin.

“Good luck,” the man calls as Ben keeps going through the ducts toward the centre of the base.

At the next hatch he prises up the grate and drops back into the familiar corridors. He has a destination in mind, and he starts for it at a run. His mother had suggested a fallback position in case of disaster, just as Luke had no doubt arranged for the Falcon’s crew to circle back to the base as a fallback in case Kylo Ren had planned a double-cross. Wheels within wheels. _Also,_ he thinks grimly, _the family tendency toward catastrophe and disaster._

There are Rebel soldiers running in every direction, some shouting evacuation orders, others clearly deciding that today is their day to die. In the distance he hears Chewie’s familiar voice, and his heart lifts.  His godfather is probably with Rey, and they will protect each other.

Ben ignores the Rebels and stormtroopers alike and flings himself around corners, down a flight of metal stairs, and comes to a sudden, skittering halt as a concussion grenade bounces around the corner to land at his feet. He manages to flick it back with the Force, but it still explodes far too close by and he finds himself slammed back against the wall, ears ringing and vision blurred.

Ben closes his eyes and tries to drag himself upright using the wall. When he opens his eyes, he knows who he will see. The throbbing pressure in his head is back, tenfold.

“Kylo Ren,” a familiar voice says, and his guts turn to water.

 

 


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So as some of you have already guessed, this will become a series. I had intended one (heh, medium-sized) fic, but the next part of this story feels quite different than the first, so...  
> see you in Part 2?

 

 

Ben swallows and stumbles backwards, away from that undeniable pull. “Not anymore,” he manages. His touchstone is still there, still intact, and Snoke can’t get to him like that, not now. Gods, his ears won’t stop ringing. He forces his eyes open and manages a shaking breath as his back hits a set of blast doors.

He fumbles for the controls even as he meets Snoke’s hooded gaze.

“You think it’s as easy as that, do you?” the older man says, striding forward.

 _Easy?_ He almost laughs. Then the doors open and Ben stumbles back, hands flailing for purchase. His shoulder connects with something and he sags against it, wishing his head were clearer, wishing he was sure of which door he’d just opened. “No,” Ben answers.

Right now the only thing he knows is the bright spark of terror that comes with facing Snoke, and the full awareness of his own weaknesses. At least Rey is elsewhere. She can handle herself. She can handle anything on this base, except Snoke. But Ben can feel her, just faintly, in his mind, which means she is all right.

His seeking hands find the shape of a wheel, rough canvas. He’s stumbled into the disused hangar, then. The only things down here are parts for ships and maintenance droids. He takes a steadying breath. “Nothing about this is _easy_. But at least Ben Solo makes his own decisions and his own mistakes.”

“And those decisions you’re so proud of making. Are they working well?” Snoke mocks. “I saw those soldiers. Jailers. They wouldn’t even give you a _weapon_ , let alone allow you freedom to use the Force.” He stalks forward, igniting his lightsaber. “No blaster, no saber, and none of your precious _family_ by your side.”

The words hit like hammer blows, and Ben hunches against it as Snoke continues, “You’re alone, _again_ , abandoned and three times over a fool. There is no-one left in your life you haven’t betrayed, as Kylo Ren _or_ Ben Solo, and you’re a murderer ten times over in _both_ your worthless lives.”

“I am,” Ben says. There’s the sound of running feet outside, shouts, blasters and fighting. Snoke would have brought bodyguards, and he can only assume there are Rebels fighting out there. Now is the time then, while Snoke is one man only, no guards to support him. “I don’t deny it. But there’s one more thing I am that you’ve forgotten to mention.”

“And what is that?” Snoke spat, stalking forward. “A _fool?”_

“I’m Han Solo’s son,” Ben replies, “and no matter how unlikely things seemed, Han Solo always found a way out.” He reaches out a hand blindly, hoping against hope that this is what his mother intended, and says, “ _Now,_ NP9!”

From behind him comes a little chirrup, and then the faint metallic clunk of a droid’s panel opening. His lightsaber arcs through the air even as Snoke grimaces and swings for Ben’s neck. He closes his eyes, hand still outstretched, and lets time and the Force flow through him as one wide, potent river. He is calm, he is ready. He is one with the Force.

 _Everything will happen as it is meant to happen_. Snoke’s saber would fly true, and Ben would be no more. Or Ben’s many years of training would grant him this boon, that his saber would hit his hand at the right angle, blade springing to life so instantaneously that it would catch the killing stroke before it landed.

Ben keeps his eyes closed, and breathes in the Force.

There is a flash of light by his eye, and the unmistakable sound of two lightsabers, blades crossed. Ben opens his eyes.

His own, red blade is vertical, close enough to the skin of his cheek that he can feel the burn. Snoke’s blade is angled straight for Ben’s throat, ready to remove his head, and the older man is flinging all of his weight, his rage and the Force behind it. Still, the blades do not move.

Ben shoves, hard, puts some space between the two of them and rolls away, ducking through the machinery parts and the stacks of supplies.

Snoke stalks forward, flinging huge machines and boxes aside with the flick of a hand. His rage is immense, building, beyond any controlling and as Ben scrambles back he watched the man fling the undercarriage of an X-Wing aside as if it were a tree branch. The hangar floor is clearing as if from a strong wind, even as Ben backs further into the space. He can see from the corner of his eye fights are breaking out on the upper levels, Rebels and stormtroopers shooting and falling down staircases and tumbling from catwalks, some of them landing on the parts and machinery that are tumbling out of Snoke’s path like twigs in a storm.

He swallows and focuses on Snoke, on keeping his mind focused against the tornado that is battering him.

Snoke’s face twists. “I _made you_ , boy, and I will _destroy_ you. You think you can walk away from this? From _ME?_ ”

“You _ruined_ me,” Ben finds himself saying. “You _stole my_ _family_ from me.”

He sneers. “You threw them away with barely any encouragement from me. So anxious for your own glory, you barely needed my suggestions at all.”

Ben flinches. “You’re right,” he says, and slides to the right. “I was a mess of pride and temper then, and I still am. But today I can do one thing to fix the mistakes I’ve made.”

He sees the alarm in Snoke’s eyes, sees the moment the older man understands that Ben has no intention of capturing the Supreme Leader for post-war trials. Snoke’s face twists and he reaches for pallets and boxes, throwing everything he can. Ben raises his hand and uses the Force to fend off the trunk of blasters flung at him.

“I knew you’d come for me,” Ben raises his voice against the noise of the wind, the machinery. “I knew I’d get this chance.”

He deflects another trunk, a pallet, but the fourth box catches him on the shoulder and he falls to the floor with a grunt. He is rolling immediately, though, and Snoke’s lightsaber bites into the floor where Ben had just been.

Ben’s momentum takes him tumbling down a sloped section of floor. He lands at the base of a huge funnel designed for draining engine fluid. He scrambles to his hands and knees, gritting his teeth against the pain in his shoulder.

Snoke laughs and leaps down into the funnel, lightsaber already swinging. Ben rolls again, too slow and Snoke catches his hip with the blade, but his triumphant laugh catches in his throat as he realizes, a half-second too late, what is missing.

The Force. In mesh cages beneath the sloping floor his mother had stored a dozen ysalamir, unseen but no less useful.

“NP9,” Ben shouts, “Lock it down.”

Even as he speaks the cage walls are dropping down around them. Ben scrambles to his feet and takes a long moment to stare at Snoke. Without the Force the man is immediately diminished, and he sets his teeth in a snarl.

Snoke is good, but he is older and slower than Ben. Without the advantage of the Force, it will be the work of only seconds to finish it. “A coward to the last,” the older man sneers.

“Says the man who invaded the mind of a six year old child,” Ben retorts. “You lied to me and manipulated me before I even knew what the Force _was_.” They circle each other, eyes flat, and then Ben lunges, strikes left, right, right again, testing Snoke’s reach, his capability without the Force.

“And I enjoyed _every minute of it_.” The man’s breath is hot and foul. “You were weak then, and you’re weaker now, and when I’ve ended you I’ll search out your little _sweetheart_ and I will rip her pretty little soul to _shreds-_ ”

Ben lets out a roar and twists his wrists, kicks at Snoke’s knee and shoves hard with his saber. The older man staggers back, nothing but fear and anger and spite in him, even as Ben raises his blade one final time.

Behind Snoke the doors slide open and there, silhouetted is Rey, her staff clutched in one hand and a locator in the other. In the distance Ben can hear muted sounds of fighting.

“For my father,” Ben whispers, and runs Snoke through.

Snoke’s body jerks, a hushed, choking sound comes from his mouth and then, horribly, he smiles. “You’ll see him soon enough, Kylo Ren,” he spits, and turns his wrist. “Now _die.”_

A panel in the hilt of Snoke’s lightsaber opens, and a wide, gleaming blade flies straight at Ben, so close, so _fast_. He reaches reflexively for the Force, but remembers - too late - the _ysalamir_. He dodges, flinging himself to the left as hard as he can.

The wide blade buries itself between his ribs and he draws in a hot, shocked breath at the bloom of pain.

Snoke bares his blood-flecked teeth as he drops to his knees. Ben tightens his hand on the hilt of his weapon and finds the strength to slice the blade right through Snoke’s neck, separating head from body. His drops his lightsaber, then, and lets out a huge, relieved breath.

Ben keeps his eyes locked on Rey, even as his own knees start to tremble. He staggers back one step, needing the distance from Snoke. It seems wrong to be near the Supreme Leader in any way when Rey is walking toward him. He makes it two more steps before his legs betray him and he collapses, falling against the cage walls.

She at the cage in an instant. _“Open this,”_ she shouts, and beats her hands on the bars.

“Working on it,” Ben hears the ex-stormtrooper call. “Hey, you! Droid-”

“Rey,” Ben says. He coughs, and it feels like he has swallowed lava. Everything _burns._ The one wound should not hurt this much, this quickly, no matter how deep it went. Snoke has obviously used some kind of toxin on the blade, and with surprising calm Ben realizes this is truly the end.

It feels oddly right. His mother had trusted him enough to leave Ben his lightsaber and tell him where there would be a place to trap Snoke without the Force. Luke and Rey had _mistrusted_ him enough to monitor Ben’s every move. And now Snoke is dead, and Ben has done at least one good thing with his entire, wasted life.

There is a satisfied chirrup from NP9 and the cage begins to lift. Rey flings herself down at his side.

“It’s all right,” Ben tells her.

“I won’t let you die.” She grits it out. She gestures, and a second later there are soldiers surrounding them, lifting Ben out of the cone and clear of the _ysalamir’s_ range.

“You know I deserve it,” Ben slurs. He is barely conscious from the pain of being moved, but he raises a fumbling hand to grip her wrist as her hand presses down against the free flowing blood.

“I don’t care,” she half-shouts, “You’re _not_ leaving.” He lets his head falls back as they lower him to the floor, and realizes they have quite the audience.  There are Rebel soldiers ranged along the catwalk above them, subdued stormtroopers kneeling at the Rebellion’s feet, and on his left he can see Dameron clattering down the stairs, face set and worried.

And then they are free of the _ysalamir_ and Ben can feel her fumbling around in his mind. _“Rey,”_ he manages, alarmed. “Don’t, don’t do anything…” _stupid,_ he wants to say, but he genuinely runs out of breath and groans instead. From somewhere up high he can hear a cry from Chewie that reminds him far too much of the day Han Solo died, and he winces again at the memory.

“I can, I can save you,” she manages. “I can feel it. If I can just-”

“Don’t,” he manages. “Rey, _don’t_ do it.” He gasps at another wave of pain and his fingers tighten on her wrist. He forces himself to speak, no matter how much it hurts. “That thing you can sense – it’s not something that can be undone. You’d be stuck with me. Forever.”

Stars above, he can sense her in his mind now, and she is every good thing he has ever seen or felt or heard. She is moonrise over the platina fields and she is the taste of jeyn cake fresh from the oven and she is grass beneath his feet and she is the feeling of sliding into much-needed sleep-

_Don’t, Rey, don’t, you don’t want this, you don’t want me this way there’s no going back once you do-_

He opens his eyes and he can see the ex-stormtrooper running toward them, drop to Ben’s side, eyes sliding from the wound in Ben’s chest to Rey. Ben manages to turn his head, his hands are cold now, and he knows what that means. If he can hold her off for a little while he’ll be gone and she will be safe, be free of him-

“Stop her,” he gasps to Finn, then to Dameron, who drops down beside the stormtrooper and grimaces when he takes in the pool of blood under Ben’s body. “ _Stop her_. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

“What?” Their eyes meet, and the pilot’s expression is a terrible mix of pity and understanding. His eyes flick back and forth between Ben’s chest and Rey’s set face. He shakes his head and presses a large hand over the second bleeding wound on Ben’s hip.

“She’s binding us together with the Force…” Ben’s body arches under a wave of agony. _“You have to stop her.”_

“Rey,” Finn says immediately, “whatever you’re doing, you need to stop. At least wait until Master Skywalker gets here-”

“You don’t get to leave,” Rey says, looking Ben straight in the eye. She’s so _fierce_ , and he loves her so _much_ for that fire, that implacable refusal to quit. “You don’t get to walk away from this because you’re tired.”

“S’more than even a marriage, you understand?” Ben slurs and sees Finn recoil in shock. His eyes are closing. “I know you don’t want this…”

 

 

He wakes in a bacta tank, and he can feel her lurking in the back of his mind, guarded but undeniably there.

He sighs internally, not sure why he’s surprised Rey won that argument. It’s not like Finn could match his little scavenger for willpower or sheer pigheadedness, and Poe was clearly indulging his more deluded romantic fantasies.

He blinks through the fluid, sees a figure that he’s guessing from the height is his mother, and he reaches out a hand to press against the side of the tank. Her head drops, shoulders bowed, and he is left with the realisation that he has once again terrified her into thinking she’d lost her only child, this time permanently.

 _Must stop doing that,_ he thinks blearily before he drops back into the healing sleep.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hi All  
> Yes, I'm back! My first foray into het fic here at the Archive. I saw Rogue One over the holidays and, being the contrary creature that I am, immediately got a plot bunny for Kylo Ren. Naaaturallly.  
> As is my usual, I'll be posting this as a WIP, but maybe you'll all feel better if I tell you my current word count on this fic is over 20K and it's only been three weeks. I'll finish, I always do, I promise!  
> This fic is not explicit, and I'm not sure it will become explicit by the end, actually. I *may* possibly be writing my first Harlequin Romance fanfic.  
> See you in the comments!


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